Under Lock & Key

In December 2024, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) published an article by J Sykes titled “Marxism-Leninism and the theory of settler-colonialism in the United States”(1), which repeats many of the same errors that appear in eir July 2022 article (2) arguing against Sakai’s thesis in Settlers that the white Amerikan working class constitutes a petty-bourgeois labor aristocracy.

While Sykes does not present any particularly new or interesting points about settler-colonialism or the imperialist country labor aristocracy, ey does present us with an opportunity to dissect revisionist arguments and identify the underlying theoretical errors that lead our opponents to take up an enemy line on this question. Our focus will therefore be on exposing how the FRSO line on this particular question is a reflection of their general tendency toward idealist dogmatism and metaphysical reasoning. We will see how this national chauvinist line on the Euro-Amerikan working class is connected to their enthusiastic support of revisionists like Deng Xiaoping and the bourgeois counterrevolution that restored capitalism in China.

Although it is perhaps not immediately obvious, both of these incorrect ideas arise from how they misunderstand the fundamental contradiction of capitalism in general and conflating it with the principal contradiction in particular.

General Remarks on Terminology

Before getting started, a quick note on terminology is in order. The words “white”, “settler”, “Amerikan”, and “Euro-Amerikan” will be used interchangeably here unless otherwise noted. The term “Euro-Amerikan” (often just shortened to “Amerikan”) is the most specific and precise term to use for the First World imperialist country oppressor nation. This is preferred over more colloquial terms like “white” (an unscientific “racial” category) and “settler” (potentially ambiguous) when referring to a specific oppressor nation in a particular historical context.

For readers who are not yet very familiar with Marxist terminology in general, MIM’s Glossary of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is a useful resource that is available online and can be provided to prisoners for free upon request.

It is also worth mentioning that while the MIM line on the white working class was significantly influenced by Sakai’s work in Settlers, our analysis has generally focused on the labor aristocratic (rather than settler-colonial) nature of the Euro-Amerikan working class. This is because the emergence of a labor aristocracy in the advanced countries is a general feature of imperialism rather than a particular consequence of settler-colonialism. Sakai’s detailed historical investigation on how the Amerikan working class became a labor aristocracy under concrete conditions provides us with enough information to theorize about the entire First World in general. While there are unique contradictions in nations that developed in a historical context of settler-colonialism, we agree with Lenin and the Comintern that imperialism in general has chained entire nations to finance capital and that these oppressor nation workers have material interests that are more aligned with the continued exploitation of colonized labor-power than communism.

One may reasonably ask, then, why even bother to distinguish settler-colonialism from other forms of colonialism or imperialism? We have both practical and theoretical reasons to make this distinction. On a practical level, having a correct and rigorous understanding of settler-colonialism in a particular historical context would be critical for a revolutionary government addressing the land question and calculating reparations owed to internally colonized nations for the crimes of settlers (genocide, slavery, land theft, environmental destruction, etc). On a theoretical level, it is important because we can arrive at knowledge about the contradictions of imperialism as an abstract mode of production in general by investigating the particular contradictions governing the development of imperialism in a concrete historical setting. We will see what this means in more detail in our response to Sykes and critique of FRSO revisionism.

Responding to Sykes on Settler-Colonialism

In this section, we will quote from the Sykes’ article so it is clear to our comrades reading this in prison what exactly we are responding to here and to contrast our differences in line and method. Unless otherwise specified, all quotes in this section are from Sykes.

Sykes begins with a straightforward appraisal of Marxism:

“The purpose of Marxist analysis is so that we can know how to make revolution, so that we understand the terrain of struggle, formulate correct strategy and tactics, and identify our friends and enemies. We must understand the contradictions at work in society and unite all who can be united if we want to win. So, we need to be very careful and precise in that analysis.”

So far, we do not disagree. We will see, however, that nobody at FRSO is apparently up to the task of actually performing this analysis or correctly identifying any of the glaring theoretical errors that immediately follow.

Having paid lip service to dialectical materialism, Sykes proceeds to abandon it completely in eir analysis of U.$. class structure and idealist proposition that the principal contradiction in the United $tates is “between the capitalist class on the one hand, and the multinational working class and its allies on the other, particularly the oppressed nations.”

If FRSO had any “theorists” who had bothered to actually understand Marx’s work or the categories laid out by Mao in On Contradiction, they would know the fundamental contradiction is between the forces of production and the relations of production. This contradiction is the driving force of hystory. The class struggle is a reflection of this contradiction under a particular mode of production in a concrete hystorical context where class divisions exist. The class struggle is not equivalent to the fundamental contradiction. The fundamental contradiction existed in primitive communal societies and will also exist in an advanced communist society, since any humyn society will have forces of production (labor-power, natural resources, tools/machines) and collectivized ownership is a form of production relations. Class struggle is resolved through the abolition of class distinctions under communism. The fundamental contradiction would still exist, but it would no longer reproduce the conditions for class antagonism. These are totally separate concepts that describe different things. The distinctions may seem subtle but it is important for communists to get it right, otherwise we risk saying nonsense and taking up enemy positions, which is precisely our charge against FRSO here. This confused and distorted use of terminology is in fact a load-bearing pillar of Sykes’ argument, the theoretical core of an old and rotten line.

Sykes acknowledges the existence of national oppression in some vague sense and admits that Amerika “began as a settler colonial project, founded on the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans”, but rarely identifies the oppressor nation in any concrete terms. This is what Maoists call “one-sided thinking”, which completely fixates on one aspect of a contradiction while ignoring the whole. We cannot have national oppression without an oppressor nation, just as we cannot replace the oppressor nation with the monopoly capitalist, no matter how convenient it would be if we could.

Sykes continues by dressing up this ahistorical idealism as if it actually has anything to do with Marxism:

“While it is true that the legacy of settler-colonialism in the United States certainly persists, the systems of oppression have not remained static. Dialectical materialism understands that the nature of a thing is defined by the contradictions inherent to it. Things aren’t fixed, but always changing and developing according to these contradictions.”

What is the difference between “the legacy of settler-colonialism” persisting into the present and actually being a settler-colony? This is the kind of language games revisionists use to vacillate on a question rather than take a clear, coherent and principled position. They know it would be absurd to claim that national oppression has ended in the United $tates, but they also want to argue that class struggle is the principal contradiction, so they do this sleight-of-hand that places the white Amerikan working class at the center of national liberation struggles by saying it is the same thing now as the class struggle. It is how they present ideas they presume, or perhaps wish, to be true as if they are material facts. It is how they smuggle the reactionary petty-bourgeois class interests of the Euro-Amerikan oppressor nation into the international communist movement and to divert resources from national liberation struggles that could actually develop the principal contradiction and deliver serious blows to imperialism. This is a counterrevolutionary line that runs contrary to the interests of the proletariat.

Without providing any evidence or concrete reasoning for it, Sykes claims that “different contradictions have taken the principal, determining role” throughout U.$. hystory. The national question has always been the principal contradiction in the United $tates. This analysis so far is just a long, meandering way to argue that Amerika is not a majority exploiter oppressor nation. It is also a strange, even absurd, claim to make after admitting that the United $tates was founded on slavery and genocide from the very outset.

Those of us who live in reality know that the contradiction of national oppression cannot be resolved without national liberation. The FRSO position seems to be that the national question was subsumed by the class struggle in the United $tates at some point in hystory. This is reductionist and ahystorical.

We are finally offered something resembling a thesis on what settler-colonialism is and the role it played in U.$. hystory:

“U.S. settler-colonialism is a particular social formation with a particular set of contradictions at the heart of it. Historically it is a transitionary period in the early development of the capitalist mode of production. It is characterized by the dominant role played by the contradiction between settlers on the one hand and colonized people on the other. This contradiction is the main thing shaping the trajectory of the capitalist mode of production in the period of “primitive accumulation” during its nascent development. In this way, settler-colonialism fueled the rapid growth of the capitalist mode of production in the early United States.”

There is a concrete, material claim being made here without any evidence provided to support it. The definition of settler-colonialism as being a “transitory period” is dogmatic as it is self-serving to Sykes’ argument.

Sykes mentions that class divisions existed among the settlers, many of whom were indentured servants or otherwise indebted. This is presumably meant to suggest that only the upper echelons of the settler population drew material benefits from colonialism. However, even the lowest strata of the white settlers who originally came to the colonies as indentured servants were eventually able to pay off their debts and become land owners in the early 1700s. From the very earliest days of colonization, the Euro-Amerikan oppressor nation considered access to land and upward mobility reserved to itself.(3) Meanwhile, well after the U.$. Civil War that nominally ended slavery (1865), white settlers continued to struggle to keep land promised by the government out of New Afrikan hands and expanded their land grab from First Nations.

Sykes claims that “this transitional settler-colonial period had to give way to mature competitive capitalism, bringing forth new contradictions”, suggesting that the contradictions of settler-colonialism were resolved in the United $tates by “two bourgeois revolutions, the War of Independence which overthrew the British colonial system and the Civil War, which overthrew the slave system of the Southern planter class.”

It would be more correct to say that the particular contradictions of settler colonialism had a profound (and continuing) influence on the development of capitalism and imperialism in the United $tates. If these particular contradictions (between settlers and the colonized masses) did in fact simply “give way” to the fundamental contradiction of capitalism (between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat), then how do we explain the material fact that national oppression still exists in occupied Turtle Island today? Sykes would like us to believe the Euro-Amerikan oppressor nation was simply replaced by the “monopoly capitalists” at some point, conveniently resolving the contradictions between settlers and the colonized masses. Note that this again conflates the contradiction of nation with the contradiction of production. We cannot simply substitute the capitalist class with the oppressor nation and call it a day. That is not how dialectical reason works. Sykes is resorting to metaphysics to defend an idealist proposition by arguing backwards from the white chauvinist presumption that national liberation is not the principal struggle for communists to focus on today.

Amerikan independence from Britain did not fundamentally change the class structure or relations of production in the Euro-Amerikan settler colony. The economic base and ideological superstructure that developed in Amerika remain inseparable from the genocidal land theft and exploitation of slave labor that remained at the very foundation of settler life. Whether a settler colony achieved independence from its host country or not is an irrelevant detail, what matters is the class structure that develops. Kanada never had a war for independence and is still to this day a subject of the British monarchy. This did not impede the development of capitalism in Kanada and the impact of any lingering “feudal remnants” is limited to the realm of superficial things such as street names, anthems and portraits on bank notes. While the aristocratic classes in Europe certainly enjoyed the spoils of colonial exploitation, it was settlers at the front lines who directly engaged in the plunder and genocide.

The Civil War did have a more significant impact on the class structure and property relations in the United $tates, chiefly by resulting in the abolition of chattel slavery and eventually giving limited neocolonial status (e.g. voting rights, property rights) to New Afrikans. This did not resolve the contradictions of national oppression, although it did transform external conditions such that the struggle for national liberation entered a distinctly new phase of development. According to Sakai, there were two distinct conflicts playing out in the Amerikan Civil War. The first “was between two settler nations for ownership of the Afrikan colony – and ultimately for ownership of the continental Empire” and the second was “the protracted struggle for liberation by the colonized Afrikan Nation in the South.”(4) It should also be noted that the abolition of slavery did not come from the class consciousness of white workers, nor did it engender among them any meaningful or lasting sense of solidarity with Afrikan labor.

On the contrary, white workers began to form organizations like the National Labor Union (NLU) to protect their jobs and wages from being in free competition with Afrikan workers. Groups like the KKK functioned as the paramilitary wing of this reactionary class interest. The abrupt end of Black Reconstruction in the southern United $tates and the institution of Jim Crow laws is proof that the reactionary nature of the Amerikan oppressor nation precluded revolutionary “multinational” class solidarity. The NLU (the first major federation of white labor unions, similar to the AFL-CIO today) is an instructive example on this point. As Sakai pointed out, “when the National Labor Union was formed in 1866, most of its members and leaders clearly intended to simply push aside Afrikan labor” and that a major point of contention among the white workers expressed in the first meeting was over “how the capitalists had used Afrikan workers to get around strikes and demands for higher wages by white workmen” and that the most “advanced” white workers argued for taking Afrikan workers into the NLU as a means of “driving them out of the labor market”.(5)

Similarly, it was not the monopoly bourgeoisie who organized pogroms against Chinese workers, forcing entire villages out of their homes at gunpoint – it was white workers acting in their own class interest. The bourgeoisie were generally quite content to exploit Chinese labor, which is why the white workers took it upon themselves to violently attack Chinese workers throughout the west coast and form reactionary anti-Chinese organizations such as the “Workingmen’s Party of California” and to support policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The most significant historical event responsible for consolidating the contemporary class structure in Amerika was World War II, where the United $tates emerged as the hegemonic imperialist world power and was consequently able to expand and intensify exploitation of the Third World to such an extent that the entire white Euro-Amerikan oppressor nation could be subsidized with plundered wealth from abroad. Suburbs became the new frontier homesteads on stolen land. While the rest of the world was recovering from a horrifically destructive war, the United $tates was able to leverage its military and economic advantages to become wealthier than ever. This allowed the United $tates to further shift the burdens of capitalist exploitation to the Third World and further consolidate the Amerikan labor aristocracy as loyal subjects of imperialism.

Sykes attempts to excuse all of eir ahystorical idealism by digging up a quote, presented with no citation or context, where Lenin described the U.$. War for Independence as “one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few”. Sykes also invokes a similar “famous” quote from Mao, who said that “In the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle. Among the whites in the United States, it is only the reactionary ruling circles that oppress the black people.”

Just because a great revolutionary like Lenin or Mao said something does not make it true or above scrutiny. Mao was being unscientific in making this assessment, which should be criticized regardless of the context. Like all ideas, the national chauvinism of white workers has a material basis in concrete social relations that developed in a particular hystorical context. Lenin’s remark appears in the context of a letter to U.$. workers in the early days of Soviet power and should be understood as more of a diplomatic gesture intended to garner political support for the Soviet Union rather than as a scientific statement about Amerikan hystory. It was also perhaps not so clear in Lenin’s time that the entire Euro-Amerikan nation was so firmly in the enemy camp, although even in March 1919 the Comintern was focusing their attention on struggling against the Second International and labor aristocracy by putting out statements like this:

“At the expense of the plundered colonial peoples capital corrupted its wage slaves, created a community of interest between the exploited and the exploiters as against the oppressed colonies – the yellow, black and red colonial peoples – and chained the European and American working class to the imperialist ‘fatherland’.”(6)

For an in-depth review of the how Lenin and the Comintern actually viewed the imperialist country oppressor nation working class, see Lessons from the Comintern: Continuities in Method and Theory, Changes in Theory and Conditions from MIM Theory 10.

Interestingly, Sykes admits that the United $tates does “solve its growing crises through the oppression of whole nations and peoples…in order to extract superprofits to prop up its rotten system” but then draws an erroneous conclusion that “the multinational working class and the liberation movements of oppressed nationalities [have] a common enemy – the monopoly capitalist class.”

This term “multinational working class” is used frequently in attempts to smuggle in oppressor nation chauvinism to allegedly Marxist politics! They simply cannot imagine a socialist revolution happening unless it has a white majority. This idea that a united front that includes white workers as a class is “necessary” to defeat imperialism comes from an idealist and national chauvinist assessment of the actual balance of forces. They assume pandering to white workers must be a strategic necessity and invent a political line that fits that assumption. However, hystory shows that most Amerikans will sooner rush to the defense of empire rather than struggle for the overthrow of a system that places them in materially privileged position in the global class structure.

We can draw a parallel between FRSO urging the national liberation struggles to unite with the white working class and the NLU urging New Afrikan workers to join their unions as a means to ensure the class position of New Afrikans remains subordinate to the interests of oppressor nation labor aristocracy parasitism. The practical ramification of the FRSO line would divert resources from the internal semi-colonies struggle against imperialism into pushing for the economic demands of First World parasitism. This holds back the communist movement and serves the imperialists. Hence, it is not merely wrong, it is an enemy position!

Sykes claims that a “real revolutionary movement” in the United $tates “must have working class leadership” and since “the working class…is fundamentally multinational in character” any revolutionary movement that doesn’t assume the necessity of settler leadership is based on “wishful thinking” and doomed to failure. This provides us with a good example of postmodern idealism, which rejects the scientific method and dialectical materialism by reifying subjective individual experience as the foundation for a theory of knowledge. In this context, the term “working class” seems to be understood as more of a vague cultural identifier rather than an objective material relationship to production. Sykes concludes that even though capitalism places some (unspecified and abstract) “greater pressure” on oppressed nation workers, their “white siblings” have a shared class interest because they are exploited by the “same bosses” and “the higher rate of exploitation in the oppressed nations drives down living standards for the entire multinational working class.”

If whites are exploited the same as everybody else, then why do they own more property and control more wealth than oppressed nations within U.$. borders? Why are oppressed nations incarcerated at such staggeringly higher rates than white Amerikans? How can we say that national oppression even exists if white workers are truly suffering the same oppression at the hands of the “bosses and landlords” as everybody else and that it is only the “monopoly capitalist class who reaps the superprofits from national opression”?

MIM has written and distributed volumes of literature showing precisely how the oppressor nation “workers” materially benefit from imperialism in general and how white Amerikans benefit from the oppression of internally colonized nations. This “monopoly capitalist” class has bought off the entire Euro-Amerikan nation with plundered wealth and rewarded them with preferential treatment in everything from home ownership, access to higher education, employment in higher paying white-collar professions and every other aspect of life in bourgeois society. This is not only about buying off the loyalty of white workers, it is also a practical necessity to have a large non-productive working class to oversee administration of the empire in exchange for access to a share of the surplus value produced by colonized labor power, allowing the imperialist country petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy to consume far beyond their own productive means. This is how imperialism maximizes the realization of surplus value as profit and reproduces a class structure where entire nations are chained to the interests of capital.

Sykes argues this basic realization about imperialism comes from “petty bourgeois ideas about the backwardness…of the working class”, rather than a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, and that it reflects a “pessimistic and defeatist attitude” toward the “revolutionary potential of the [imperialist country] working class”, rather than strategic confidence in the international proletariat.

The real “pessimistic and defeatist” line is Sykes’, who seems to believe that 220 million Euro-Amerikans have a decisive role to play in the movement to liberate 8 billion people from exploitation. If the international proletariat has to wait for a majority of Amerikkkans to wake up and join the revolutionary struggle against oppression, then it is indeed a bleak situation. Thankfully, we know that is not the case and have strategic confidence in the masses. It is neither necessary nor expedient for the proletariat to tail the left wing of white nationalism.

We should at least credit the FRSO for not calling their position “Maoist”, even though they do claim to uphold the Chinese revolution and dogmatically quote from Mao’s works. We can also credit Sykes with coming up with the new argument that a desire to “copy and paste an analysis of the Palestinian struggle onto U.S. conditions” is why communists consider the United $tates to be a settler colony. This absurd claim does not deserve a serious response, but at least it is something we have not heard before!

Having squeezed all that we can out of the idealist metaphysics lurking beneath the FRSO brand of revisionism on the labor aristocracy, national liberation and the principal contradiction, we will now discuss how this fits in with their revisionist line on the restoration of capitalism in China.

Theory of Productive Forces

It is generally the case in hystory that the forces of production constitute the principal aspect of the fundamental contradiction and that changes to the relations of production primarily follow as a consequence of changes in the forces of production. For example, the rise of technology like the steam engine and mechanized agriculture (forces of production) had a transformative effect on the class structure of feudal societies (relations of production). This led to the emergence of new social classes (namely, the bourgeoisie and proletariat) with a revolutionary interest in overthrowing feudal aristocracy and building industrial capitalism.

Deng Xiaoping’s “theory of productive forces” essentially claims that a similar development in the forces of production was necessary to transform the relations of production in socialist China. The revisionist coup that began in 1976 implemented policies that replaced socialist economic planning with a return to capitalist price speculation and market incentives, opened up Chinese industry to foreign investment, and forcibly shut down collectivized farms in favor of private agriculture and family ownership. Maoists view this as a bourgeois counterattack on the masses in China, who had achieved great victories in constructing socialism and mobilizing hundreds of millions to engage in ideological struggle and serve the people.

During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao led the masses of China to show how it is possible (under certain circumstances) for the relations of production to become the principal aspect of the fundamental contradiction and consequently transform the forces of production. This approach to constructing socialism requires mass mobilization and sharp ideological struggle, such that the whole of society is engaged in consciously revolutionizing the relations of production. In practice, this means industrial and agricultural development is oriented toward meeting humyn needs (rather than profits) and ideological struggle against “bourgeois right” (the idea that some people deserve to have more than others due the nature of their work, their social position, etc) was heavily emphasized and continually advanced. This is why Maoists uphold the Cultural Revolution as the greatest advance towards communism thus far in history. This is also why we view a return to NEP-style economic policies, the dissolution of collectivized agriculture and the reification of bourgeois right as counterrevolutionary.(7)

Criticize Settler Revisionism! Criticize Deng Xiaoping!

FRSO has basically the same line as their predecessor organization, the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS), in supporting Deng Xiaoping, the arrest and imprisonment of the “Gang of Four”, and the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). They defended this counterrevolution in China on the grounds of empricism and bourgeois individualist lifestyle fixations about the Gang of Four. See MIM’s 1999 congress resolution Repudiate sub-reformism; fight revisionism! for a more detailed polemic against the LRS and FRSO on this topic.

We are not surprised(8) to see an organization that still upholds Deng’s counterrevolutionary theory of productive forces consider the Euro-Amerikan working class as being part of the proletarian camp. Trotskyists make a similar error in how they understand the fundamental contradiction in the context of imperialism by obfuscating the nature of superprofits to support their chauvinist view that imperialist country workers are actually the most exploited in the world. Both of these revisionist errors are rooted in a one-sided view of contradiction and a dogmatic belief that First World wages are higher because the class struggle has advanced so much due to the more developed productive forces in advanced capitalist countries. In reality, imperialist country workers are able to live far beyond their own productive means by receiving wages many times higher than the actual value of labor-power and entire nations are subsidized by exploitation of the Third World proletariat. The imperialist country oppressor nation is an enemy class that cannot be relied upon to advance the struggle for communism.

For a recent critique of organizations nominally supporting the GPCR, but still promoting “working class unity” in the United $tates, see A Polemic against Settler “Maoism” by the Dawnland Group.

<sup>Notes:
1. J. Sykes, _Marxism-Leninism and the theory of settler-colonialism in the United States
2. J. Sykes, Red Theory: Against Sakai on settler colonialism and the national question in the U.S.
3. J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern, Fourth Edition, pp. 21 - 22
4. Ibid., pp. 88-89

5. Ibid., pp. 99-100
6. Jane Degras, The Communist International: 1919-1943 Documents, Vol. I, p.18
7. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was implemented in the early days of socialist Russia to transform backward economic conditions. It made use of capitalist profit incentives.
8. MIM Theory 10, Coming to Grips with the Labor Aristocracy, p. 28</sup>

The Barnes Review published, in their October 1996 edition, a criticism of Marx and Engels as “anti-black racists.” What followed were a series of quotations which prove this point beyond much doubt. Not only did Marx and Engels believe that Black people were inferior to whites, they upheld slavery as progressive at certain points in history, even in North America. We will not and do not contest the author on these unassailable points; we merely seek to show the deeper relations embedded within this “statement of facts.”

Modern society is built upon social relations which are wholly at odds with its technological capacity. This basic fact results in the myriad social problems we encounter in every facet of society. Our task is therefore, first, to understand these social relations, and second, to grasp the manner in which they may be transformed. This is the world-historical gift which Marx gave to the world: a guide to action. This is the essence of Marxism as a revolutionary doctrine. With this perspective on the world, who could think to waste the precious time they have on discussions of personalities? How dedicated someone is to “the cause,” how far someone was able to purge their thinking of bourgeois ideology, whether someone is patriarchal or racially prejudiced in their thoughts and actions – these are topics of gossip, and as such are not questions worthy of discussion in the tasks of a revolutionary organization. What will we focus on: the method of transforming reality in the interests of anti-imperialism, or the racial prejudices of individuals? Discussions of Marx which rise above useless biographical gossip have long become a literary rarity.

Marx and Engels upheld the racial inferiority of certain races. That is a demonstrable fact. What of it? On this our authors tell us nothing. We would like to inform the authors of this reputable and eminently revolutionary newspaper, to return the favor, that the Volga flows into the Caspian, and that horses eat oats. What wondrous facts!

There is one attempt at a discussion of a meaningful topic, however:

“Virtually every serious study concerned with the economics of employing black slaves in the American South shows, with little room for contradiction, that the importation of free white workers from Europe (skilled and semi-skilled) would have proven far more profitable economically.”

This is all we are told as a refutation of Marx’s view that slavery was an integral component in the development of the United States’ economy. It is clear to all that this is merely a platitude, a hint at a position, in order to give some measure of legitimacy to the real object of this article: to imply that Marx’s theories are merely a set of subjective views which may be regarded as reactionary and therefore worthy of being simply set aside. The reactionary nature of a theory, however, is no argument against it, however much it may seem to us that this is the case. Every proposition must be regarded objectively, concretely, and scientifically. Any deviation from this, such as the deviation exemplified by The Barnes Review, is a deviation towards post-modern thought. The question then passes to the clash between Marxism as a modernism with the movement which succeeded it, an important question, but one exceeding the bounds of this reply.

It is worth noting that white nationalist magazines coming out of Washington DC like The Barnes Review and The National Interest spend time “exposing” Marx like this. The latter is the home of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, that saw U.$. imperialism’s global hegemony after the collapse of the Soviet Union as the pinnacle of humyn society, proving the alternatives unworkable. Today the imperialists clearly disagree, as they work to upend the status quo of the United $tates dating back to Fukuyama’s 1989 work. And communists have always disagreed, pointing to the continued heightening of the contradictions within capitalism that Marx elucidated, and the bourgeoisie largely ignores. The early attempts at socialism in the USSR and China were massively successful for decades, with China building on the lessons learned in the USSR. While these early attempts were ultimately overthrown, the proletariat does not give up so quickly.

As for The Barnes Review, their latest issue condemns funding to I$rael and exposes the propaganda around Hamas. So far so good. Then it links all of this to “international Jewry.” While many fascists today support the fascist project of I$rael, The Barnes Review keeps it old school by exposing Marx and the Jews as the source of evil. Here we see how a publication can mix correct conclusions with metaphysical methods of understanding the world. In contrast Marx and Engels, despite having some incorrect conclusions around race, had (and developed) a scientific method of understanding the world that is dialectical materialism, which continues to be a tool for understanding and transforming our world.

Readers of ULK will read many other, less mainstream, publications in their search for answers, for the source of the evil they see in the world. While the I$rael lobby is certainly the enemy of the people, and generally speaking, so is “the white man,” it is the system of imperialism that we must focus our ire at. There is no metaphysical, absolute source of evil; oppression is the product of economic forces that Marx did so much to expose for us. And it is in the resolution of the contradictions of the imperialist system (the contradiction between exploiter and exploited nations, the contradiction between the means of production and the relations of production, etc) that we can build a society without so much unnecessary humyn suffering as ours.

MIM(Prisons) regularly publishes articles speaking on the reprehensible conditions in U.$. prisons. Why do oppressed nationalities suffer these life conditions disproportionately, and what is the solution?

The United $tates has been the largest economy in the world for some time. How is that possible? It is made possible because the United $tates reaps this profit out of the Third World. Many people know this subconsciously, but do not put all the pieces together. There is a common joke about Asian children making smartphones, but we do not question why this is the case. It is the case because it is profitable for the United $tates, because the company makes more profit when they pay lower wages, then these commodities are brought to the United $tates and sold for cheap, and everyone here benefits. The company makes a profit and the Amerikans get cheap goods. That much is clear from a cursory look, and proved by the recent literature on “unequal exchange.”

It is obvious why the Third World is placed into poverty by this system, but why the oppressed nationalities within the United $tates? Historically, the internal semi-colonies were sources of wealth as well, but today it is a question of distributing that wealth from the Third World. The Amerikan nation recognizes, consciously or unconsciously, that they have an interest in keeping their plunder to themselves. For that reason, Black and Brown people are excluded from employment, education, housing, and all the benefits of Amerikan empire. Racism, therefore, is the way that Amerikans assert their economic interest in keeping others from getting a hold of their money.

The movement against racism stems mostly from the desire of the oppressed nationalities to integrate into the empire; the desire here is for an empire free of national bigotry, wherein the currently oppressed nations have equal access to the wealth which is pulled out of the Third World, the globally oppressed nations. Anyone with two eyes, however, can see that this struggle has been raging for decades without an end in sight. The oppressed nationalities within the United $tates cannot leave behind the Third World on the low chance that they may succeed in becoming one with the beast; they must ally with the Third World in the struggle against imperialism. Only by overthrowing this system of class and national divisions can the oppressed within this country live to see a day where oppression in general is dying out, and prisons in particular become based on rehabilitation instead of “punishment,” and where people are not restricted from life opportunities in the interest of protecting the wealth of the privileged nation.

Does anyone today believe that true integration, true “equality” between nationalities in this country is possible through the ballot or any other means? The response to this question will be “if not, what hope is there?” The choice seems to be between the gradual struggle for equality on the one hand or nothing on the other, since the only method of achieving liberation without reform is revolution, and most cannot imagine the oppressed nations in this country winning any real fight against the empire. But why are we imagining this fight as only between these two competitors? The oppressed nations within the United $tates are only one component part of the oppressed nations of the whole world. The struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism is a global one, uniting all who can be united. Yes, none of the oppressed nations in this country can liberate themselves: neither the Black nation, nor the indigenous nations, nor the Chicano nation. But the struggle of all these nations, by themselves too weak to overthrow imperialism, together form a mass which vastly outweighs the strength of the United $tates, and this is where our strength lies. This is where our strategic confidence in success comes from. Through the international struggle imperialism will overextend itself, and it will open inroads for success in national liberation struggles. These successes will weaken imperialism further, eventually setting the scene for the truly anti-imperialist force, the socialist working class, to make its appearance.

I recently read a writing titled: “Law, Prison and Double-Double Consciousness: A Phenomenological View of the Black-Prisoner’s Experience” by James Davis III. This led me to write the following:

“What I pondered was my own double-double consciousness! The development of the”New Afrikan” within the greater black populace of captives. From the taking of the Afrikan attribute(s)’s learning of Ki-Swahili, the mandated study of all things dealing with black culture, history and struggle, to the daily remaking of one’s world view through study and application…the identity of “New Afrikan” implores one to rise above the lowly station of inmate, of n-word.”

In reading this piece by Mr. Davis, I was reminded of the innate power of a man. The power to literally reinvent oneself within an environment designed to annihilate the soul of a man. Prison(s) are created with a purpose to force a human to willingly acquiesce to half-man existence.

To develop a double-double consciousness is to resist such inferior station(s), to be a man! One who stands on principle(s), personified purpose, and willingly accepts his responsibilities to both uplift and reeducate the masses, which is a revolutionary ideal!

To embrace a revolutionary ideological precept is to strive even harder at evolving this “double-double consciousness”. Aside from the aforementioned character improvement(s), the revolutionary-minded man immerses himself in all things dealing with progressive politics and the science of struggle.

As his prison cohorts grow comfortable living captive man half-lives (i.e. embracing typical prison activities: gambling, drug usage, etc.) the revolutionary-minded captive creates a compass of consciousness which guides him daily. He spends his time always pushing himself to excel, regardless of tasks or conditions.

This is the cat who aligns with other men who reject the half-lives and/or inferior designations expected of the captive class. Whenever he/they are seen, they’re reading something, writing something, attending college, engaging in some form of constructive dialogue, or physically training their bodies. Forging his new self: the unbroken, unbowed man that’s living and potentially dying, upon revolutionary standards and practices.

The identification of oneself as a militant, as a revolutionary theorist, anchors oneself. As those around him list to-and-fro, uncertain of their next move(s), the innate belief within the mind of the man moving by a revolutionary compass is that he represents something greater than himself. That he is a soldier that happens to be behind enemy lines if you will: captured! It is through this perception, that he re-imagines his reality, and in turn finds purpose in his every action. He discovers the reservoir of resistance within which moves him to set his personal bar of daily exemplary conduct higher than those around him. Understanding his calling, devoting himself to the people. To meeting their needs.

I find all of the above to be quite close to describing myself. Though admittedly, I fall short of the mark most days. Being human, with all of the subjectivisms that accompany it, at times, my objective conditions threaten to overwhelm me. Yet it is the will to win, to resist the “colonial mentality” which has historically impacted my ilk, propels me to stand firm. Existing within a perpetual mode of resistance!

In looking back, I can really see that I’ve been in a state of rebellion my entire life! That I have never been one of those “go along to get along” type of brothas. Unfortunately, this ingrained sense of recalcitrance has led to many years of imprisonment and designations by those of the oppressor class, as being anti social and/or suffering some mystery “personality disorder”. To not be a shoe shine boy, a buck dancing coon, a tom! The conventional roles assigned to the U.$. man/woman of color! Is to be castigated by those in power, and/or positions of authority.

I now fully comprehend this whole “double-double consciousness” as it pertains to myself individually and my New Afrikan/black kinfolk! Collectively! All colored folk whom live in capitalist society, which is governed by those who use race and class as measurements of worth! Not only adjust to the double consciousness of faux citizenry…they also develop their own “double-double consciousness” to cope!

However, the one brutal fact which distinguishes the U.$. Black man/woman from any other ethnic groups is the historical miscarriage of chattel slavery! Our socio-cultural creation of a double-double consciousness is our collective survival mechanism if you will. A way to figuratively stay rooted in our Afrikan beginnings! Whilst literally standing on the shoulders of the many, many activists, struggle-ists, revolutionaries, and average citizens whom were wounded, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered! For daring to dream of having freedom, justice and equality! We repay the debt to our martyrs by clinging fiercely to their memories, living within our “cocoon’s” of double-double consciousness! Forging bonds with other forward thinking folk of Afrikan ancestry. And then, united in purpose, teach others how to “escape” our half life existences! Moving towards a revolutionary ideology and corresponding actions as the conditions reveal the time to manifest them! I stand firm within the confines of a satanic creation! Striving to be the catalyst for progress and change. As I survive, only through my own “double-double consciousness” cocoon.

MIM(Prisons) adds: Davis’s double-double consciousness is a product of alienation through oppressive structures. These oppressive structures isolate people from “the world”, putting them in a new reality, with new rules and norms, that are generally worse than “the world” they know in every way. This is in contrast to prisons in socialist China – where people were encouraged (you might say coerced) to study the outside world, to better understand their own actions and find a new way to be in that world that is in line with the interests of the people. In a socialist prison, criminals can focus on struggling with themselves because they aren’t forced to struggle against the oppression of the prison environment first.

We offer comrades support in developing the consciousness that is in rebellion against the oppressive system. We offer Under Lock & Key as a forum to connect with and share ideas with other like-minded individuals. We have our Revolutionary 12 Steps that is one tool for those trying to transform themselves into new people. And we have books on revolutionary societies like China, and their prison system, and how they were able to radically transform a whole society. So if this comrade’s essay resonates with you, get involved and get plugged in with these resources today!

Freedom is never voluntarily granted by the oppressors. It must be demanded by the oppressed at all costs. The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience, but where he stands in moments of challenge, moments of grand crisis and controversy. Freedom is never given to anybody. Privileged classes never give up their privileges without strong persistence. Colonialism was made for domination and exploitation. Often the path to freedom will carry you to your death or to prison. As oppressed people we have experiences when the light of day vanishes, leaving us in a desolate midnight, moments when our highest hopes are brought to shambles of despair, when we are victims of terrible exploitation. During such moments our spirits are almost overcome by gloom and despair and we feel there is no light anywhere. But again and again we discover that there is another spirit which shines even in the darkness, and frustration becomes a beam of light. There are those who write history, those who make history, and those who experience history.

A Juxtaposition to the Works of Orisanmi Burton

A spear, utilized as a weapon to engage in battle, can only be effective insofar as its tip is both sturdy and sharp. And the sharpness of its tip is maintained as part of a process of sharpening in the continuum of a protracted struggle campaign. Otherwise, what you’ll have is not an implement for war, but a stick that merely rhetorically projects a technology for combat that in actuality, is incapable of immobilizing or pushing back against a harmful, even deadly force. So considering the condition of the spear, I have no intention to deal with or re-visit the “Long Attica Revolt” with historicism, relegating the event to a time in history; nor to romanticize its existence for the purposes of psycho-emotional or intellectual masturbation. Instead, I relocate the Long Attica Revolt to the present moment in hopes of creating dialogue and theory around the fundamental question of whether the “Long Attica Revolt” (i.e the prison movement) still exists?

I start my analysis of the question at the end and (epilogue) of Orisanmi Burton’s (hereinafter Ori) text with the statement:

“For many, 1993 was a watershed in the slow disintegration of the prison movement.”(1)

If 1993 marked the crucial turning point in which the prison movement started dissipating, or decomposing, what does the reality look like in 2024, 31 years after its evocation? If we are serious about “interpreting the world to change it, there is no escape from historical materialism,”(2) requiring my analysis to stay anchored to tackle the question from my direct experience as a prisoner of 21 and a half consecutive years of carceral bondage within Michigan prisons. In so doing, I stay true to Mao’s injunction to adhere to what [Vladimir] Lenin called the “most essential thing in Marxism, the living soul of Marxism, [the] concrete analysis of concrete conditions.”(3)

The “prison movement,” according to the New Afrikan analysis that I subscribe to, marked a specific moment in time that spearheaded a qualitative change, transforming issue-based prison struggles centered primarily around conditions of confinement (reform), into a movement that was influenced by and married itself to the anti-colonial national liberation struggles being waged beyond the concrete walls (revolutionary). These circumstances, having affected colonial people on a world scale, radicalized and politicized sections of the colonial subjects in the united states to such an extent where the consciousness developed inside of penal dungeons was being disseminated to the streets where it would be internalized and weaponized by agents against the state. The impetus for this qualitative leap in the substance and character of the prison movement was Johnathan Jackson’s 7 August 1970 revolutionary act of pursuing the armed liberation of the Soledad Brothers, culminating in the 9 September 1971 Attica Rebellion. This is why Ori argued the “Long Attica Revolt was a revolutionary struggle for decolonization and abolition at the site of US prisons.”(4)

While Ori’s assessment may have been correct, his very own analysis, and a concomitant analysis of present-day Michigan, exposes a revolutionary contradiction prone to reversion and therefore revolutionary (Marxist) revision by elements that were, in fact, never revolutionary or abolitionist but only radical reformist. Revisionism spells doom (death) to the prison movement, so part of our objective has got to be how do we oppose the carceral state from an ideological and practical perspective to ensure the survival of a dying prison movement, and reap benefits and successes from our struggle. After all, Ori tells us the aim of his book is “to show that US prisons are a site of war, [a] site of active combat.”(5)

Clausewitz (Carl von) observed that war was politics by other means, just as Michel Foucault reasoned politics was war by other means. War and politics being opposite sites of a single coin, this “COIN” in military jargon is none other than “counterinsurgency.” As explained in the U.S. Army Field Manual at 3-24. It defines insurgency as:

“an organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of established government, occupying power, or other political authority while increasing insurgent control.”

“The definition of counterinsurgency logically follows:”Counterinsurgency is the military, paramilitary, political economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.””

“Counterinsurgency, then, refers to both a type of war and a style of warfare”(6), whose aim is, in the context of prisons, to neutralize the prison movement and the ability of its agency to build the movement into the future.

As we can see, by isolating and extracting this point from Ori’s text, u.s. prisons as combat zones where war is waged is significant if we are to gleam from this fact what the proponents, the protagonists of the prison movement must do next; how we struggle accordingly in hopes of gaining victories.

The Master Plan

The logical response of a revolutionary tactician to state repression is resistance. But not just resistance for the sake of being recalcitrant – as Comrade George (Jackson) informed us, our fight, our resistance has to use imagination by developing a fighting style from a dialectical materialist standpoint. Because

“…we can fight, but if we are isolated, if the state is successful in accomplishing that, the results are usually not constructive in terms of proving the point. The point is, however, in the face of what we confront, to fight and win. That’s the real objective: not just make statements, no matter how noble, but to destroy the system that oppresses us.”(7)

In constructing long-term insurgency repression (counterinsurgency), the scientific technology deployed by the state was “soft power” as its effective mechanism to accomplish their task. Ori tells us the federal government drafted a “Master Plan” which hinged on “correctional professionals coming to realize that the battle is won or lost not inside the prison, but out on the sidewalks.”(8) This assessment could only be true considering the question surrounding prisons and the corollary prison movement is one of legitimacy, for only through legitimacy could the state preserve carceral normalcy. So counterinsurgency, or war, to be overtly specific, and the game is the acquisition of legitimacy from the masses (national public at-large) as a main objective. This fact should be telling that the struggle for state oppression, aggression and repression within the context of the prison movement is ultimately always a struggle for the people. Thus, “in an insurgency, both sides rely on the cooperation of the populace; therefore they compete for it, in part through coercive means.”(9) These political facts, as tactics of war, envision the real terrain in which the battle for prison lives is waged: the mental realm. It is within this domain that resistance and the legitimacy on both sides of the barb wired cage will be won.

The prisoner population must take cues from these facts. The very first recognition has got to be that prisons, deployed as war machines, cannot possibly be legitimate if we (the prisoners) have been cast as the enemies the state seeks to annihilate as human beings by re-converting us from second-class citizens back to slaves. This was the very point Ori lets us in on regarding Queen Mother Moore’s August 1973 visit and speech in Green Haven Prison in New York, that New Afrikans were in fact enduring “re-captivity.”(10) Blacks have long hoisted this argument, lamenting an amendment to the 13th Amendment to the u.s. constitution, and a host of case law, like the case of Ruffin v Commonwealth cited by Ori, have declared “incarcerated people slaves of the state.”(11) And as slaves, to borrow the words of George, “the sole phenomenon that energizes my whole consciousness is, of course, revolution.” In this vein the prison movement is partially about the survival of the humanity of prisons, their dignity, which requires the survival of the spirit of the prison movement. This is what Chairman Fred Hampton meant when he said “You can kill a freedom fighter, but you can’t kill freedom fighting. You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill revolution.” It is this very same deprivation of human dignity that Huey talked about resulting in what I’m experiencing among Michigan prisoners, who are largely “immobilized by fear and despair, he sinks into self-murder”.(12) But even more dangerous to Huey than self-murder, is spiritual death, what Huey witnessed become a “common attitude… driven to death of the spirit rather of the flesh.”

So the very idea (spirit) of the prison movement must survive, must be kept alive, or, “your method of death can itself be a politicizing thing.”(13). And this is precisely the reality Michigan’s male prisoners have succumbed to, death of spirit, death by de-politicization.

All this begs the question posed by George: What is our fighting style in face of political death? This question can only be answered against the background of the statement: “For many, 1993 was a watershed in the slow disintegration of the prison movement,” because the reality shouts out to us that the prison movement has diminished to such a degree, it’s in desperate need of being incubated back to life (if it still exists at all).

Thus far it has been made clear that at issue is the survival of the prison movement which means by extension a revival of the political life of prisoners. The catalyst breeding political consciousness can only be education. As Ori illuminates, part of the prisoner war project requires guerrilla warfare, the life of which itself is grounded in political education.(14) Ori himself writes in the acknowledgment section of Tip of the Spear that he sharpened his spear (political analysis) by tying himself to a network of intellectuals and study groups, like Philly-based podcast Millenials Are Killing Capitalism.

The Role of Outside Supporters

The “Master Plan” developed by the state concluded “that the battle is won or lost not inside the prison, but out on the sidewalks,” and this leads directly to the utility of individuals and organizations outside the confines of prison life to be leveraging against the subjects inside the walls. Yet, it must not be lost upon us that by virtue of the state’s “Master Plan”, they seek to weaponize outside organizations as tools to drive a nail in the coffin of the prison movement once and for all. Proponents of the prison movement, accordingly, must also utilize and weaponize outside agency to advance the prison movement. When asked, although George said, “A good deal of this has to do with our ability to communicate to people on the street,” we must nevertheless be sure not to allow this communication or the introduction of outside volunteers to stifle the spirit of the movement.

Ori hits the nail on the head when exposing the “Master Plan” to absorb outside volunteers as part of the “cynical logic of programmification, with well-meaning volunteers becoming instruments of pacification.”(15) I spoke to this very phenomena in 2021 essay entitled “Photograph Negatives: The Battle For Prison Intelligentsia”, in response to a question posed to me by Ian Alexander, an editor of True Leap Press’s “In The Belly” publication, on whether outside university intellectuals could follow the lead of imprisoned-intellectuals? There I mentioned how Michigan’s outside volunteers near absolute adherence to prison policy, designed to constrain and be repressive, retarded our ability to be subversive and insurgent, called into question the purpose of the university-intellectuals infiltration of the system in the first instance. And while “many of these volunteers undoubtedly had altruistic and humanitarian motives, they unwittingly perpetuated counterinsurgency in multiple ways.”(16)

The battle for prison intellgentsia itself creates an unspoken tension between the inside (imprisoned) and outside (prison) intellectuals to the detriment of the prison movement, benefiting the state’s “Master Plan.” As I cited in “Photograph Negatives,” Joy James correctly analyzes that it is the imprisoned intellectuals that are “most free of state condition.” Scholar Michel-Rolph Troillot’s insight also champions that imprisoned intellectuals, “non-academics are critical producers of historiography,”(17) yet, as Eddie Ellis told Ori during a 2009 political education workshop, “We have never been able to use the tools of academia to demonstrate that our analysis is a better analysis.”(18) This fact further substantiates my position in response to editor Ian Alexander that outside university-based intellectuals must take their lead from imprisoned intellectuals because (1) we are the experts, validated through our long-lived experiences; and (2) most university-intellectuals are clueless they’re being used as tools within the state’s “Master Plan” against the very prisoners that altruism is directed.

Carceral Compradors Inside

But sadly, it’s not just the outside volunteers being positioned as pawns in the state’s war against prisoners. To be sure, prisoners themselves have become state agents, be it consciously or unconsciously, pushing pacification through various behavioral modification programming that intentionally depoliticizes the prisoner population, turning them into do-gooder state actors. It is in this way that the prison state “strategically co-opted the demands of the prison movement and redeployed them in ways that strengthened their ability to dominate people on both sides of the wall.”(19)

In Michigan prisons, these compromised inmates function as “carceral compradors,” and part of the plan of this de-politicizing regime is to convince the prisoner population to surrender their agency to resist. It has been the state’s ability to appease these, what Ricardo DeLeon, a member of Attica’s revolutionary committee, said was the elements of “all the waverers, fence sitters, and opponents,”(20) exacerbating already-existing fissures, exposing the deep contradictions between a majority reformist element, and the minority revolutionary element. This success effectively split and casted backward the “prison movement” to its previously issue-based conditions of confinement struggle model by “exposing a key contradiction within the prison movement, ultimately cleaving support from the movement’s radical edge while nurturing its accomodationist tendencies.”(21)

All of this was (is) made possible because “a sizable fraction of the population that saw themselves, not as revolutionaries, but as gangsters: outlaw capitalists, committed to individual financial gain”(22), and radical reformist, despite their rhetoric to the contrary, focused rather exclusively on conditions of confinement, instead of materializing a revolutionary goal. If the prison movement is a revolutionary movement, then the revolutionary element must manage to consolidate power and be the final arbitrators of the otherwise democratic decision-making processes. Ori cites Frantz Fanon to make clear that political parties serve as “incorruptible defenders of the masses,” or, the movement will find itself vulnerable to neocolonial retrenchment.(23) The schism that emerges between these two factions, ideologically, paralyzes the prison movement. These implications obviously extend beyond the domain of prisons to the collective New Afrikan struggle on the streets, as the prison movement was fostered by national liberation struggle on the outside, lending the credence to the victory from the sidewalk notion. But in order to secure a revolutionary party-line, the revolutionary party must be the majority seated element in the cadre committee.

Perhaps this is precisely why Sam Melville, a key figure in the Attica rebellion, said it was needed to “avoid [the] obvious classification of prison reformers.”(24) This is significant because otherwise, reformists would dominate the politics, strategies and decision-making, killing any serious anti-colonial (revolutionary) ideology. Again, this is true for both the inside and outside walkways. As a corollary, this reality should cause the revolutionary-minded to seriously rethink ways in which our struggle is not subverted from within the ranks of fighters against the state who, contradictorily, are okay with the preservation and legitimization of the prison machine and its “parent” global white supremacist structure, so long as remedial measures are taken to ameliorate certain conditions.

Our Road

In advance of summarizing, let me just say I do not at all intend to imply a reformist concession can’t be viewed as a revolutionary advancement within the overall scheme of carceral war. I pivot to Rachel Herzing, co-founder of Critical Resistance, that

“an abolitionist goal would be to try to figure out how to take incremental steps – a screw here, a cog there – and make it so the system cannot continue – so it ceases to exist – rather than improving its efficiency.”

But that’s just it. The Attica reforms did not, as Rachel Herzing would accept, “steal some of the PIC’s power, make it more difficult to function in the future, or decrease it’s legitimacy in the eyes of the people.” On the contrary, the Attica reforms entrenched the system of penal legitimacy, seeded the proliferation of scientific repression, and improved upon the apparatus’s ability to forestall and dissolve abolitionist resistance. In addition, the reforms were not made with the consent of the Attica revolutionaries, but by a splintering majority of radical reformers who, in the end, the present as our proof, greased by the levers of power assenting to the machine’s pick up of speed and tenacity.

As inheritors of the prison movement, and as we consider the de-evolution of the Long Attica Revolt and all it entails, specifically its survival, we are called upon to meditate on Comrade George’s essential ask – What is our fighting style? At minimum, I suggest our task is implementing a twofold platform: (1) political education; and (2) internal revolutionary development.

First, those equipped with the organization skills and requisite consciousness, as a methodology of guerilla war, should construct political education classes. These classes should operate within study group formats. We must return to the injunction of prisons functioning as universities, that “The jails (and prisons) are the Universities of the Revolutionaries and the finishing schools of the Black Liberation Army.”(25) We align ourselves with the Prison Lives Matter (PLM) formation model and utilize these study groups to engage in:

“a concrete study and analysis of the past 50+ years, and in doing so, We learn from those who led the struggle at the highest level during the high tide (1960s and 70s), where and how the revolutionary movement failed due to a lack of cadre development, as well as knowing and maintaining a line.”(26)

Our political education study groups must also instill a pride, courage, and will to dare to struggle along the lines of New Afrikan revolutionary ideology. For desperately, “Our revolution needs a convinced people, not a conquered people.”(27) The quality of courage in the face of impending brutality by what Ori calls the state’s “carceral death machine”(28) will be necessary to put in gear the wheels of guerrilla resistance. The invocation of this spirit sets apart the human prepared to demand and indeed take his dignity by conquest, from the weak, pacified slave who rationalizes his fear, which is in fact “symptomatic of pathological plantation mentality that had been inculcated in Black people through generations of terror.”(29) This terror in the mind of Black males inside of Michigan cages is displayed at even the mention of radical (revolutionary) politics, inciting a fear drawn from the epigenetic memory of chattel slavery victimization, and the propensity of master’s retaliatory infliction of a violent consequence. This thought has frozen and totally immobilized the overwhelming majority of Black Michigan prison-slaves, not just into inaction, but turning them into advocates of pacified slave-like mentalities. But these niggas are quick to ravage the bodies of other niggas.

To this point, Ori writes

“Balagoon suggests that the primary barrier to the liberation of the colonized was within their minds – a combination of fear of death, respect for state authority, and deference to white power that had been hammered into the population from birth. Liberation would remain an impossibility as long as colonized subjects respected the taboos put in place by their oppressors.”(30)

To be sure, liberation struggles can only be “successful to the extent that we have diminished the element of fear in the minds of black people.”(31) Biko, speaking to this fear as something that erodes the soul of Black people, recognized “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed.”(32)

Secondly, hand-in-hand with our political education must be the material engagement in the first revolution, the inner revolution. This is “The hard painstaking work of changing ourselves into new beings, of loving ourselves and our people, and working with them daily to create a new reality.”(33) This first, inner-revolution consists of “a process of rearranging one’s values – to put it simply, the death of the nigger is the birth of the Black man after coming to grips with being proud to be one’s self.”(34)

The ability to transform oneself from a nigga to an Afrikan man of character is perhaps the most important aspect of developing concordance with a New Afrikan revolutionary collective consciousness. Commenting “On Revolutionary Morality” in 1958, Ho Chi Minh said that “Behavioral habits and traditions are also big enemies: they insidiously hinder the progress of the revolution.” And because niggas, unbeknownst to themselves are white supremacists and pro-capitalist opportunists, the vanguard security apparatus must forever remain on guard for the possibility of niggas in the rank-and-file corrupting the minds of other niggas who have yet to internalize New Afrikan identity.

May these be our lessons. Ori’s Tip of the Spear text is important in the overall lexicon on the history of the prison movement, and must be kept handy next to the collection of Notes From New Afrikan P.O.W and Theoretical Journals. Tip of the Spear should serve not just as reference book, but a corrective guide for the protagonist wrestling the prison movement out the arms of strangulation, blowing spirit into the nostrils of its decaying body until it’s revived, and ready to fight the next round. And We are that body. Let’s dare to do the work.

Forward Towards Liberation!

We Are Our Liberators!

^*Notes: 1. Orisanmi Burton, October 2023, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, University of California Press, p. 223 2. Praveen Jha, Paris Yeros, and Walter Chambati, January 2020, Rethinking the Social Sciences with Sam Moyo, Tulika Books, p.22 3. Mao Zedong, 1937, “On Contradiction”, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung 4. Burton, p.52 5. Burton, p.224-226 6. Life During Wartime, p.6 7. Remembering the Real Dragon - An Interview with George Jackson May 16 and June 29, 1971, Interview by Karen Wald and published in Cages of Steel: The Politics Of Imprisonment In The United States (Edited by Ward Churchill and J.J. Vander Wall). 8. Burton, p.175. 9. Life During Wartime, p.17. 10. Burton, p.1 11. Burton, p.10 12. Huey P. Newton, 1973, Revolutionary Suicide, p.4 13. Steve Biko, I write What I Like, p.150 14. Burton, p.4 15. Burton, p.179 16. Burton, p.175 17. Burton, p.8 18. Burton, p.7 19. Burton, p.150 20. Burton, p.41 21. Burton, p.150 22. Burton, p.99 23. Burton, p.92 24. Burton, p.82 25. Sundiata Acoli, “From The Bowels of the Beast: A Message,” Breaking da Chains. 26. Kwame “Beans” Shakur 27. Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983-1987, p.417 28. Burton, p.105 29. Burton, p.42 30. Burton, p.42 31. Biko, p.145 32. Biko, p.92 33. Safiya Bukhari 34. Burton, p.62

What is to be done? That’s the most important question for a revolutionary. “How can it be done?” is as important. Theory and practice are of equal importance when it comes to revolution. Theory without practice, ideas without action, are useless. Practice without theory leads to failure. That’s why Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels decided that scientific socialism will accomplish what utopian socialism could only dream of. An event such as the Great October Revolution of 1917 required a leader such as Lenin, a philosopher. Now, a revolution is for the people. That’s why we need to educate the people, and to do that we should educate ourselves. Study politics, history, science, psychology, philosophy, but most importantly study revolutionary history and the writings of past and present revolutionaries. It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance. We need well-educated revolutionaries.

The Black Panther Party was committed to educate the people and they required their members to study. They studied Mao, Lenin, Marx, and the works of Black radicals. The Black Panther newspaper was meant “to educate the oppressed”. That was its primary purpose. Che Guevara was a brilliant man who educated people through his speeches in a clear manner. Mao, Lenin, Marx, Engels, they all wrote extensively in order to guide their readers before, during, and after a revolution. Why wouldn’t we take advantage of all that wisdom?

Karl Marx was a philosopher, sociologist, economist and a voracious reader. Lenin too. And they studied the works of different types of radical thinkers. They studied, and admired, the French Revolution. Lenin was a fan of Peter Kropotkin’s history of the French Revolution. Karl Marx admired Charles Darwin’s work, and noticed how Darwin was influenced by Thomas R. Malthus. How can we claim to support scientific forms of socialism and never actually read any science, or economics at least?

I recommend the following: “Quotations From Chairman Mao Zedong” edited by Lin Biao, “Essential Works of Lenin” edited by Henry Christman, “Theories of Surplus Value”, “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, and “The Poverty of Philosophy” by Karl Marx, “The Black Panthers Speak” edited by Philip Foner, and any other books on radical politics, history, science and philosophy.

And remember, comrades: “Hasta la victoria siempre!” -Che Guevara

MIM(Prisons) responds: We welcome this statement from the study group of the Iron Lung Collective, and we support its sentiments. Through our Free Political Books to Prisoners Program, comrades inside can receive any of the books Modern Cassius recommends, with the exception of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong or “The Little Red Book.” We believe all of the historical texts of revolutionaries must be studied and understood in their historical context. The mish-mash of quotes from different periods of the Chinese revolution in “The Little Red Book” make it very difficult to do so.

As we work to re-ignite the prison movement, regular, local study groups are the base of our efforts to re-build. We have a guide for starting a local study group, and a decent stock of revolutionary and historical literature you can find on our literature list. Please see page 2 of ULK for more details on how to participate in the Free Political Books to Prisoners Program.

The theme of this issue of Under Lock & Key was inspired by recent essays and interviews by Orisanmi Burton, previewing material from eir upcoming book: Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. Comrades in MIM(Prisons) and United Struggle from Within (USW) have been studying Burton’s work. Though we have not had the opportunity to read the book yet, which comes out end of October 2023, we like a lot of the ideas ey has presented so far and the overall thesis that prisons are war.

As we go to press the genocidal war on Palestine is heating up. We have reports inside on Congo, El Salvador, Ukraine and Niger; and we don’t even touch on Guatemala or Haiti. History has shown that as war heightens internationally, war often heightens against the oppressed nations within the empire as well.

In this issue we have reports of political repression as war in U.$. prisons. We also feature articles from comrades who organized around, and reflected on the Attica rebellion and Black August. This is the history that Burton analyzes in eir work, exposing the state’s efforts to suppress the prison movement and how both sides were operating on a war footing. For over a decade readers of ULK have commemorated the beginning of Attica on September 9th with a Day of Peace and Solidarity, as part of the campaign to build the United Front for Peace in Prisons. But how do we get to peace when we find ourselves the targets of the oppressor’s war?

Burton pushes back against some Liberal/reformist lines that have been advanced onto the prison movement to oppose the line of liberation. Burton’s ideas harken back to V.I. Lenin, recognizing prisons as a repressive arm of the state, and the state being a tool of oppression and warfare by one class over another. War is one form of political struggle, and a very important one at that.

It is this framework that we have used to push back against “abolitionism.” Our organization emerged from the struggle to abolish control units, a form of prisons that is torture and inhumane. We see the abolition of control units as a winnable, if difficult, battle under bourgeois rule. In a socialist state, where the proletariat rules over the former bourgeoisie, we certainly won’t have such torture cells anymore; but the abolition of prisons altogether is a vision for the distant future. We find it questionable that Burton frames revolutionary communist martyrs like George Jackson as an “abolitionist”.

Where we have more unity is when Burton takes issue with building the prison movement around the legalist struggle to amend the 13th Amendment of the U.$. Constitution that abolishes slavery except for the convicted felon. Burton points out the history of Liberal thought in justifying enslavement of those captured in just wars. As most in this country see the United $tates as a valid project, it could follow logically that it is just to enslave the conquered indigenous and New Afrikan nations, as well as nations outside the United $tates borders. We see how settlers in Amerika and I$rael are now justifying all sorts of genocidal atrocities against Palestine.

The challenge we have repeatedly made to the campaign to amend the 13th Ammendment is how this contributes to liberating oppressed people? How does it build power for oppressed people?

In one essay Burton draws connections to how the state was handling the war against the Vietnamese people at the same time as the war against New Afrika at home.(1) We have a draft paper out on the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement that discusses the counter-insurgency in Peru, and how the fascist U.$.-Fujimori regime locked communist leader Comrade Gonzalo in an underground isolation cell and then used confusion around political line to crush the People’s War in that country. In Under Lock & Key 47, we reprinted an in-depth analysis of the use of long-term solitary confinement against the revolutionary movement in Turkey and the use of hunger strikes to struggle against it from 2000-2007. All of these historical examples, including to some extent New Afrika in the 1970s, involved an armed conflict on both sides. Today, in the United $tates, we do not have those conditions. However, we can look to the national liberation struggle in Palestine, and the connection to the prison movement there as a modern-day example.

Burton spends time exposing the politics of the federal counter-insurgency program PRISACTS. And one of the things we learn is that PRISACTS is officially short-lived as the counter-insurgency intelligence role is taught to and passed on to the state institutions. We see this today, especially in the handling of censorship of letters and reading materials we send to and receive from prisoners. We see the intentional targeting of these materials for their political content, and not for any promotion of violence or illegal activity. Our comrades inside face more serious consequences of brutality, isolation and torture in retaliation for attempts to organize others for basic issues of living conditions and law violations.

The arrest of Duane “Keffe D” Davis for involvement in the murder of Tupac Shakur has also been in the news this month. Keffe D is a known informant who confessed to driving his nephew to murder Tupac years ago in exchange for the dropping of a life sentence for an unrelated charge. Author John Potash notes that there were many attempted assassinations of Tupac prior to his death, at least one that involved the NYPD Street Crimes Unit. This unit was launched following the supposed “end” of COINTELPRO.(2) This directly parallels what we see with the “end” of PRISACTS and the passing of intelligence operations on to state pigs.

As we’ve discussed in drawing lessons from the repression of Stop Cop City, we need to take serious strategic precautions in how we organize. We must recognize the war being waged on us. If we treat this as something that can be fixed once people see what’s going on, or once we get the right courts or authorities to get involved, we will never accomplish anything. And as always we must put politics in command. There is an active intelligence counter-insurgency being waged against USW and the prison movement in general, and the best weapon we have is grasping, implementing and judging political line.

Prison is War is not just a topic for ULK, it is a political line and analysis. We welcome your future reports, articles and artwork exposing the ways this war is happening in prisons today.

<sup>Notes: 1. Burton, Orisanmi (2023).“Targeting Revolutionaries: The Birth of the Carceral Warfare Project, 1970-1978.” Radical History Review. Vol. 146.
2. John Potash on I Mix What I Like, 16 October 2023. (author of “The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders”)</sup>

“You must teach that socialism-communalism is as old as man; that its principles formed the basis of mostly all the East Afrikan cultures (there was no way to denote possession in the original East Afrikan tongues). The only independent Afrikan societies today are socialistic. Those which allowed capitalism to remain are still neo-colonies. Any Black who would defend an Afrikan military dictatorship is as much a fascist as Hoover.”

• George Jackson

No one in history ever possessed a greater skill set for individual survival than the primitive hunter-gatherer warrior, yet ey was a deeply committed communalist who put the interest of eir tribe, eir village, and eir extended family above his own. The warrior believed that eir life was not eir own, but belonged to the people; and ey considered it a great honor to live a life of service to the people and if need be to sacrifice eir life in their defense. This is the warrior’s ethics, and it doesn’t matter which group on which continent we are talking about because such are the roots of humyn social evolution.

There have always been individuals, and in a sense there has always been individualism, but it wasn’t always regarded as a virtue. In primitive societies, it was seen as dishonorable – like lying or cowardice. There were few things that could get one thrown out of the collective and be made an outcast. Rampant individualism was one. To be cast out was worse than a sentence of death. We are social beings, and it is in society that we find fulfillment of any emotional needs. In prison, when the kaptors want to try to break us, they put us in solitary confinement.

Capitalism promotes individualism because everyone is set in competition with everyone else. People must compete for jobs, promotions, and for status. Every capitalist is in competition with every other capitalist. That’s why it is called a “rat race.” People suffer from “alienation” and seek some substitute for tribal belonging. People will join gangs and kill or be killed just to have this sense of belonging. Is joining the marines any different? People become ardent sports fans to have some group identity and wear their team’s colors and share their glory. Belonging is a need under capitalism: everything is commodified.

Bourgeois critics often make the charge that socialism sacrifices the interest of the individual for the collective; but are the individual and the collective really in contradiction? This is what Stalin had to say in his interview with H.G. Wells in 1934:

“There is no, nor should there be, irreconcilable contrast between the individual and the collective, between the individual person and the interests of the collective. There should be no such contrast because collectivism/socialism does not deny but combines individual interests with the interests of the collective. Socialism cannot abstract itself from individual interests. Socialist society alone can most fully satisfy these personal interests. More than that, socialist society alone can firmly safeguard the interests of the individual. In this sense, there is no irreconcilable contrast between individualism and socialism.”

Unless the individual’s interest is to do harm to the collective, to exploit its members for personal gain, or subvert its freedom, it is in the collective interests to give full play to the individual’s initiative and creativity. Mao’s famous call for individual freedom of expression in the arts of science was in contrast to certain dogmatic and bureaucratic tendencies that has arisen in Russia and China:

“The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science.”

Some would later complain bitterly that Mao had lured them into a trap when they were subsequently criticized for their ideas. But freedom of expression is not freedom from criticism. Ey never said to let the poisonous weed to bloom.

The democratic method is to allow people to speak their minds, but this is a two-way street. Others have the right to disagree and criticize you as well. The collective interest will best be served when people are above board and say what they think, at the risk that it will be picked apart and rejected by others and even ridiculed as rubbish by the majority. No one is obligated to tell you your opinions are great. On the other hand, your opinion might find favor and change everyone’s views for the better. That is the risk of free expression. New ideas always start with someone who thinks for themselves and may not at first be popular or well accepted.

In this way a revolutionary organization/collective pursues its inner collective democracy while maintaining unity in action. There is a time for free discussion and time for united action and this is the basis of democratic revolutionary praxis. The collective protects the rights of the individual who serves the interests of the collective.

The comrades of your collective should be like your family – even closer than that. Your very lives may depend on each other. The comrades will each have different strengths and weaknesses and should complement each other using their own strengths to help the others transform their weaknesses into strengths. Comrades should not be competitive with one another. Recognition and advancement are fine, but one should be happy to serve in whatever capacity the collective feels would be best. It is all about what we can accomplish together – whether one is high or low in rank is insignificant. To be a comrade is important.

The Supreme Court of the United $tates (SCOTU$) has been busy this past year. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade still fresh in the public consciousness, the last month has seen the demise of student loan relief and affirmative action.

None of these rulings are of grave interest to Maoists on Occupied Turtle Island. College is seldom in reach for the lumpen and proletariat of this continent, and affirmative action in universities (especially Harvard, the topic of this case) concerns the comprador classes of the oppressed nations more than it does the masses. Despite its faux celebration of diversity, the 15% “African-American” portion of Harvard’s student population is anything but representational. The interesting aspect of these rulings, insofar as they exist, is how the rulings relate to the broader Amerikan assimilation strategy of the oppressed nations. The rulings may indicate a more general wavering of assimilation as a strategy for semi-colonial management or that the strategy has been sufficiently completed such that it may begin gradual discontinuation. There is also the strong possibility that we are witnessing the legal expression of the reactionary wing of social-fascist hegemony overpowering its liberal elements.

Though the material impact of these rulings on Maoist organizing are not terribly significant (especially within prisons), the spree of rulings serve as an opportunity to reflect on the nature and purpose of law in bourgeois society. We’ll take the time here to briefly glance over the persynal ideologies and behaviors of two of the more noteworthy SCOTU$ members, use these to reflect on the liberal worldview of law more generally, then transition to a materialist explanation of law and justice. Let’s begin with some words from Chief Justice Roberts.

In a September interview with Colorado Springs 10th Circuit judges, 2022, Roberts described the “gut wrenching” experience of his daily commute to the Supreme Court. Following a draft opinion leak that revealed the Court’s intention to overturn Roe v. Wade, the building had been surrounded by a staff of guards and newly-erected barricades. This change was to the discomfort of Roberts and his colleagues, who shared stake in the tale that their careers were in justice, and not law. After lamenting the oppressive arm of the state’s failure to keep an appropriate distance from him, Roberts spent the majority of the remaining interview pearl-clutching over the public’s lack of faith in the Court’s independence from politics. He painted a troubling tale of what Amerika would look like if the courts were just a piece of political machinery like Congress of the Presidency. His persistence in the apolitical nature of SCOTU$ was unwavering.

Since then, details have come to light concerning the life of another member of the Court, longest-serving Judge Clarence Thomas, a man who shares in Roberts’ conviction of the apolitical nature of the Courts. To describe the findings of investigators who began breaking stories in April of this year as aspects of Thomas’ persynal life is misleading. We don’t believe there’s anything persynal about them. Of particular note in the latest news splash was Thomas’ close relationship with prominent Republican financier Harlan Crow, a collector of Nazi memorabilia and real-estate mogul of $29 billion in assets. Though Thomas forgot to put them on his financial records, flight records reveal he has enjoyed over two decades of apolitical weekly summer visits to Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks, vacations on Crow’s superyacht, and flights on Global 5000 jets. Thomas’ grandnephew also enjoyed the generous patronage of Crow, who had paid his way through private boarding school. In 2005, a case involving Trammell Crow Residential Co. found itself before the Supreme Court. The company was being sued $25 million for (allegedly) using copywritten building designs. The order by the court denying the petition to hear the case consisted of a single sentence. Thomas did not recuse himself from the ruling.

This brings us to the fable we are told of the nature of law in the liberal world order. When we think of law, we are often brought to conjure images of court debates, evidence inquiry, or statuettes of scale-holding, blindfolded wimmin dressed in Graeco-Roman garb. These images are designed to have us associate law with the long history of philosophic investigation into the matter, of which there are over two millennia of content. More specifically, we are meant to sympathize with the enlightenment-era revival of these ideas, lest we think in units of cities and societies, as Socrates or Plato would have us do, rather than individuals, like Kant and the liberal framework he filtered these discussions through. But any talk of justice or morality is incomplete without discussing how these ideas change (or, much more likely, reinforce) the way humyn beings relate to each other in society. Indeed, it should tell us something that Amerikan conventions of justice derive from the social traditions of ancient Greek Hoplite classes. That is to say, the quarter of Greek society (in the case of Athens, the most “equalitarian” example one could choose from) that sat atop a social pyramid of slaves. Though the law did not extend agency to these lower classes, it was very concerned with them.

Only the wretchedly naive buy into the Court’s mythos of impartiality. In part, this is due simply to how unsubtle they are about this reality. The Supreme Court, for instance, is known for its habit of pre-planning sessions to throw a few bones to liberalism before saving the announcement of profoundly reactionary rulings for the end (this particular session was no exception: loan relief and affirmative action were taken to roost only after the entre of indigenous adoption and limitations on gerrymandering). Though intentions don’t matter in politics as they are speculative and unknowable to anyone but the subject, the behavior of the Court in these matters is apparent; they are deeply concerned with their relation to partisan politics and structure their role in the state apparatus around this reality.

But all this is to miss the main essence of the bourgeois fiction about legal justice. The ideology of Roberts, and bourgeois dictatorship in general, insists on an illusion that neither the Greeks nor Kant were ever under the spell of. We find justice and law proposed to us as a single concept, yet the two are barely related. The illusion of the synonymity of justice and law depends on the thinker approaching law from an individualist perspective. It may, for instance, feel like justice when someone who starts a petty fight on the street gets charged, but law is not manufactured on the individual level; as policy, it is a society-wide institution and serves a society-wide function. Law serves a far more critical function than social conventions of justice. When you think of Lady Justice, do you recall that she carries a sword in her right hand?

Despite their ideological pretenses, the courts admit this distinction between law and justice in their united front of “originalist” interpretation. When interrogation of the practical effects of their decisions prevent the Justices from waxing over the moralist namesake of their title, the oft heard defense for their ultra-reaction is that their job is not to make ethical decisions, but to interpret the constitution as it was written. Even the antipode of this wing who believe the constitution is a “living document” work within the same framework: the text will give us the answers and it is therein that law will be made.

To posit legal interpretation as an objective endeavor (sometimes referred to as “textualist reading”) is a difficult argument to take seriously, despite two centuries of top Amerikan legal minds insisting that we do so. Indeed, “objective law” is an oxymoron. The Maoist understanding of legality is much less fanciful: law is the codification of social relations. Under capitalism, that means the writing down of acceptable parameters for ownership and exchange in such a way as to ensure the maintenance and expansion of current (capitalist) relations. This can be seen in the early history of law, which followed, in all its independent developments, agriculture – the great first-permitter of primitive accumulation.

The primary development that brings law into being is the social invention of the concept of ownership. This concept of ownership comes about necessarily in pairing with general law. Let’s look at law in its cell form to elaborate this point. Say I am a wheat farmer who labors to produce 20lb of grain. With bourgeois consciousness, I conceptualize this process as myself putting active labor into seed and soil, and seeing (throughout a growing season) that labor be embodied into a crop. Of note here is that I am not my labor. I made my labor, but it is not me. Instead, my labor has been embodied in the crop. This embodiment Marxists call value. However, at this stage, my labor embodied in the crop is only potential value. Value, for Marxists, is a social phenomenon. See, if I were the only person on Earth, objective determinations of value would be impossible as I could subjectively declare the worth of anything around me without challenge. As a farmer in a capitalist economy, however, I do not plant crops because I find wheat persynally valuable. No, I make it so I can sell it on the market. In this process of (market) exchange, the potential value of my product becomes realized value. For the value of my product to realize its value, it must be desired by another persyn who wants to impose their will on the product to the exclusion of others, including myself. This is a fancy way of saying that the buyer wants to be able to eat the grain or bake it into a cake without having to share it between now and then. Here enters the social concept of ownership. When I bring my wheat to market, I have a social right to it and become a social subject. When someone else wants to buy it, they are also a social subject, and if we agree to exchange, the social concept of ownership for the wheat transfers to them. In short: (i) I own the wheat, (ii) I sell them the wheat, (iii) now they own the wheat. When enough members of an ownership class get together and create a society-wide, binding contract to enforce their ownership over objects, that contract becomes law, and the apparatus that enforces this ownership code becomes the state. Wheat is an apt example because agricultural goods formed the foundations of the first states, ruled by land-owning classes.

In the second chapter of Volume 1 of Capital, Marx tells this very narrative (though in denser terminology),

“It is plain that commodities cannot go to market and make exchanges of their own account. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are also their owners … In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by mutual consent. They must therefore, mutually recognize in each other the rights of private proprietors. This juridical relation, which thus expresses itself in a contract, whether such contract be part of a developed legal system or not, is a relation between two wills”.

From this humble origin, it may be seen that law is not derived from moral notions. The two are only related insofar as they are like products formed to justify the same class society. Worse, law in our time is inherently unjust, as it is no more than an appendage of the apparatus of the Amerikan state (or Amerikan imperialism when imposed on the world at large). Law is the codified will of a state, itself the guarantor of relations of production and exchange. As such, there are no prisoners who are not political prisoners. But law is not the frontline of class struggle.

Class domination, in both its organized and unorganized form, is much broader than what is officially enshrined by any wing of state power. Beyond mere law, the dominion of this regime is expressed in the dependence of the government on banks, capitalist, labor-aristocratic groupings, the persynal connections of state apparatchiks with the ruling class (a la Thomas), and the semi-colonial management of the oppressed nations. None of these relations have any official codification in law. Nevertheless, it is on legal grounds that bourgeois society protects itself in the continuation and expansion of these horrific realities. State authority, that special force separated from society we know all too well, may bridge the gaps on its own. Bourgeois law need not directly sanction bourgeois right, imperialism, and national supremacy. Indeed, it would be against ruling-class interest to be so explicit. Bourgeois law need only provide the framework to get these tasks done, the state will pick up the slack.

With this origin and purpose of law in mind, considering SCOTU$ as a non-ideological institution becomes as absurd as Justice Roberts’ faint of heart over what the outcome of his job looks like to the portions of humynity who live below the steps of the ornate buildings he spends his life sheltered within. For the masses, the juxtaposition of Hellenic architecture and barbed wire is so far from “gut wrenching” that it’s almost cliche. There is no more fitting a place for riot gear and sandbags than the courts, except perhaps Wall Street and Southern Manhattan.