MIM(Prisons) is a cell of revolutionaries serving the oppressed masses inside U.$. prisons, guided by the communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
Under Lock & Key is a news service written by and for prisoners with a focus on what is going on behind bars throughout the United States. Under Lock & Key is available to U.S. prisoners for free through MIM(Prisons)'s Free Political Literature to Prisoners Program, by writing:
MIM(Prisons) PO Box 40799 San Francisco, CA 94140.
The British did it to the Native
Americans,
the Zionists are doing it the Palestinians
taking the people’s land.
No one wants to stop the genocide,
because it’s not their people being victimized,
but let it would have been the other way around,
they would be begging the world to sympathize.
To all “Bund” Jews, I love you,
if you’re a “Zionist”, fuck you,
for what you’re doing to the Palestinians,
the new Hitler is Netanyahu.
It ain’t Israel or the Jews, it’s the Zionist government,
doing Amerikkka’s bidding and devilishment,
manipulating the six point star, invaders being decadent.
To Israel, Amerikkka’s giving weapons of every kind,
while sending food and aid to Palestine,
what could be more hypocritical,
people, please read between the lines.
If you vote for any of these hypocrites,
you are worst than them in head and feet.
Before I vote for any plutocrat,
I’ll vote for a dog in the street.
This is no democracy, it is a plutocracy,
the Palestinians are dying by the thousands,
to uphold CIPWS Zionist supremacy.
Your time is coming NetanHITLER,
you will forever be guilty in the eyes of history.
Dear pro Palestinian student protesters,
please know that the world is with you,
you own the future.
You are being admired by all,
including prisoners,
but most of us don’t understand,
what’s really going on
because your picture,
is being painted by the CIPWS
(capitalist imperialist patriarchist white supremacist)
media.
Please understand
the masses only know of Israel, and Palestine,
from a biblical perspective and point of view.
Thus, it is easy for the CIPWS,
to turn the miseducated against you.
As was done against the Panthers,
and every other movement,
that came egalitarian and true.
So I request that you paint your own narrative,
tell the politically miseducated,
and myopic,
why you do what you do.
Explain to the miseducated,
that the Arabs are semitic too.
And the Zionists are racist Europeans,
manipulating the word “Jew.”
The first Zionist conference,
was held in 1897,
which made all else post-holocaust,
capable of coming back through.
Expatriation to Israel in 1947,
declared independence on land,
on which they were in 1948,
still foreigner new.
Expelling 700,000 Arabs from Israel,
no telling how many thousands they also slew.
Expelling 250,000 more Arabs from Israel,
in 1967,
giving birth to what is now called,
the West Bank and Gaza,
out of blood the invaded still spew.
Fast forward to the present,
after 70-plus years Israeli occupation,
and oppression,
with nothing but the US to thank.
Wombmen and children in Israeli prisons,
for offenses,
as simple as throwing rocks at tanks.
Amerikkklan drones, rockets, missiles,
lynching Palestinians,
with no regards for age, sex or rank.
Turning Gaza into one big prison with a flag,
surrounded by barbed wire, check points,
facial recognition cameras,
and sadist, racist, fascist,
antisemitic Israeli tyrants,
turning any hope for egalitarianism,
into a ship,
that in 1947 went rogue and sank.
Pro Palestinian student protesters,
everything I’m saying here,
you are all probably already well aware.
But these truths are all unknown,
to the world’s people,
especially here on Turtle Island,
Amerikkka.
So tell your own story,
because the CIPWS media,
is miseducating the people about ya,
using CIPWS propaganda.
Do not allow the CIPWS media,
to paint your narrative or speak for ya.
This is how they turned the people,
against every egalitarian movement,
threatening the rule, wealth and power.
I am in prison,
and the CIPWS media is the only means,
of knowing in real time what’s happening.
The CIPWS has oppressed prisoners,
identifying with the Israeli invaders,
who did the land grabbing.
Zionist settlers living on blood stolen land,
doing the real antisemitic crabbing.
Show the world the true colors of the Zionists,
their antisemitic parasitic back stabbing.
Apartheid genocide,
all with Amerikkklan economic backing,
and bureaucratic white supremacist trappings.
Can’t fight, kill and die,
for people who do know why,
or for whom you are snapping.
knowing the history of a situation,
is what makes it worth the sacrificing,
and strapping.
Lift your voice, shout it all out,
over-talk and out-talk,
the CIPWS media’s constant capping.
While you are organizing,
educate against the 400 years of lies,
keep the lies from escaping the mouths,
of those doing all the CIPWS rapping.
Make it known to the world,
that the Palestinians,
are the Shemitics(Semitics).
And the Zionists are the true antisemitics.
Living on stolen land, and being parasitic.
The CIPWS media,
is telling lies about you,
that you are being violent,
and antisemitic,
for defending the Ishmaelites,
the Palestinians, the first Semitics,
If they don’t believe you,
tell them,
“do research on the topic”.
“Google it”.
They say the best way to hide something is to put it in plain sight.
Student-led activism in the majority New Afrikan populated area of South
Baltimore has rendered this old saying no longer true. For about ninety
years corporate coal companies and the city government have allowed and
perpetuated landfills, and literal mountains of coal being piled up in
plain sight in residential areas, and even directly behind rec centers
with playgrounds and children.
For the last 100 years, coal has been brought into the port city of
Baltimore by the freight transportation company CSX. In data derived
from 2021, it was found that CSX transported more than 8 million tons of
coal into South Baltimore, where the coal is then transported all over
the world. Freight trains coming through the Baltimore transport
terminal with coal on them spill black coal dust throughout South
Baltimore and pollute the air.
Pollution is so outrageous in this predominately New Afrikan
community that the number one cause of death is respiratory related
issues. The death rate from respiratory disease in South Baltimore is
more than twice the rate for Baltimore as a whole. Respiratory disease
is killing more people in this section of the city than diabetes, drugs,
or gun violence. A staggering 90% of youth from the area suffer from
different degrees of asthma, which has been causing chronic death.
What is by now very obvious to anyone is that coal and other
pollutants should not be in residential areas, but the fact that they
are and have been so carelessly handled for generations now, in a
predominately New Afrikan section of a predominantly New Afrikan city,
illustrates major contradictions of the national oppression of so-called
Black people, and Our neo-colonial relationship to the empire and
certain classes within Our collective body-politic.
It is under this back drop that a youth organization was founded in
2011 at the local Benjamin Franklin High School, called Free Your Voice.
In 2011 the Free Your Voice student-activists were fighting, and
eventually defeated an effort to build a waste incinerator in South
Baltimore. The incinerator would’ve burned tons of trash and waste, and
released pollution, as well as converted electricity from the burned
waste.
Today, Free Your Voice is still active and continues to replenish its
pool of student-activists. Now however, the struggle with CSX and city
and state officials is much more daunting. Free Your Voice and
supporters from the community and local colleges have set out to get the
state’s environmental regulators to deny CSX’s operations permit on the
transport terminal and pay residents of South Baltimore reparations for
generations of ‘environmental racism’ (Genocide).
These efforts have been hampered by what some deem as betrayal by the
first ‘Black’ top environmental regulator in Maryland and her
declaration that she and her agency know it’s coal and coal dust found
on streets and public areas but can not act without actual proof of the
identity of the substance.
Laws against air pollution are written so that oppressed and
vulnerable masses of people are at severe disadvantage and would in most
circumstances be dependent upon state agencies, who are in cahoots with
big industrialists, to gather and test substances in question. People
have to prove they’ve been or are being poisoned by specific substances
before regulators can take action.
Students from Free Your Voice along with local college volunteers
spent the summer of 2023 collecting and testing particles of dust found
in the S. B-More area. They have and continue to go door-to-door
spreading the findings of their research with the general community.
Thus far, although the terminal has not been shut down and the mountains
of coal still reside behind rec centers and playgrounds, Free Your Voice
has achieved quantitative victories.
The student-activists’ work thus far has:
Made it harder for city officials, state politicians, and local
residents to ignore their oppression;
They’ve won over neighbors to their work, elevated consciousness
around air pollution and the complicity of the occupying government in
environmental destruction;
They’ve garnered meetings with state regulators, and the fact
that the head of the environmental regulation agency in Maryland is a
‘Black’ female, has elevated the class consciousness and the reality of
the New Afrikan National neo-colonial status;
The aspirations of their movement have risen. From slight reforms
like covering or pouring water on coal mountains in the ghetto, to now,
aspiring to remove or shut down the train terminal.
The continuing work of Our young people is not only there to be
acknowledged and supported, but more importantly in the long run there
are lessons to be learned from this particular student movement. I’ll
touch on some of them briefly here.
For one, while it is widely known that almost all previous moments in
the generational struggle of New Afrikan people the student movement was
the brain trust, and the heart of the struggle. We often fail to make
the connection that these previous students were so successful in
galvanizing people and nationalizing their structures because they
championed causes that had nothing to do with school or education. The
Free Your Voice Movement in S.B-More has connected the youth movement
with environmentalism, and those two things have unearthed class
oppression and national oppression. Our students must make these same
connections around the empire. What is the one thing that connects the
student in B-More to the student in southside St. Louis, or San
Francisco, or in Cancer Alley Louisiana, or Jackson, Mississippi, or
Flint, Michigan? It’s environmental issues. The organizing method We
should take at organizing the student movement in the spirit of New
Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalism (NARN) is to connect environmentalism
with student activism and revolutionary nationalism.
What also struck me in my research of this issue and struggle was the
fact that college students and former students of Franklin High School
have continued to come back and aid and assist in the struggle
there.
The college level student with a NARN orientation must make their
presence and ideological-theoretical prowess available at the sites of
active student movements. In these times of social media, student
activists from each of the previously mentioned cities and others can
and should be in direct communication, and NARN’s must take proactive
steps to influence the direction of the student movement, nationalizing
it and moving it in the direction illuminated by the Front for the
Liberation of the New Afrikan Nation (FROLINAN)’s Programs For
Decolonization, while also incorporating environmental and climate
related concerns to the FROLINAN program for National Alliance of New
Afrikan Students. If implemented by youthful NARN, i believe We can
succeed in building a NARN centered national youth movement.
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
In mid-February on H-pod here in the ECB [Expansion Cell Blocks]
prisoners got together and submitted 30 grievances about lack of dayroom
and outside rec which G-5, G-4 and G-2 are all experiencing here in the
ECB. The response from Warden Smith was that they are “understaffed”. I
may submit my own grievance just to see if I get the same response
though I have to be careful as the guards are using the gangs to police
the prisoners and some of these fucking “Homeboys” do the pigs’ work for
them violently. But I thought I would call your attention to an
interview of Bryan Collier in the Nov-Dec 2023 and Jan. 2024 Echo
Newspaper. In the January edition Collier admits to having
“staffing” problems. So both Collier and Smith are aware of this
understaffing but still it continues and they are not releasing anybody
or hiring enough to quell the problems.
Two weeks ago it is rumored that a prisoner was raped by his celly.
The word is this is the reason one of my classmates has been missing. I
don’t know if a FOIA can be filed and help his family to get these
motherfuckers? But being understaffed is dangerous and cruel for all of
us.
These 30 grievances from G-4’s in H-pod on ECB and the January 2024
interview of Collier show corroborated “Deliberate Indifference.” Maybe
I should also grieve this and send my copies to a supporter who can
coordinate with prisoners, legislators, and the D.O.J. I’m sure Genocide
Joe would love to get a piece of Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton for the bad
press they have given him on the border?? We should take advantage of
these asshole politicians whenever we can!!! Anyway, if you have any
extra ULKs sitting around and can afford to send me another
bulk mailing, please do so, so that I can distribute them here.
Securus advertises package pricing for movies I think that are about
$12 a month but they are not offering these packages. Instead we have to
pay from 6-12 dollars per movie rental! And they blame Hollywood Studios
for this price gouging. I wonder if Hollywood knows about how they are
exploiting us and our families? We should get Netflix for $16/month or
something but 4.99-19.99 before tax is too much to charge “slaves” who
do not get paid for their mandatory work!
MIM(Prisons) responds: It’s ironic that Abbott is
fighting to militarize the border, but can’t find enough people to run
his prisons. Though it’s our understanding that many Texas prisons are
already being staffed by Nigerian immigrants working on visas. Meanwhile
they have gangs working for the state, implementing repression and
keeping the population sedated on drugs, while the staff sit around
doing nothing. Though Biden has no qualms about supporting genocide, he
does like scoring political points on Greg Abbot. This comrade might
have a good idea here.
Heru: So why aren’t you fighting the real criminals?
Pig: Who are the real criminals?
Heru: The plutocrat politicians who create and perpetuate the policies
that create and perpetuate the poverty that give rise to crime.
Pig: Are you saying that crime comes from poverty?
Heru: Most crimes are miseducated and reactionary responses to poverty.
Even yours included.
Pig: Are you calling me a criminal?
Heru: Yes and of the worst kind, your fear of poverty made you a
criminal for the plutocrats and their CIPWS bosses.
Pig: Am I in the streets selling drugs and robbing people?
Heru: Worst, you are protecting and serving, only, the interest and
agendas of the upper class CIPWS. You’ve sold your soul to the
plutocrats, doing whatever they say, in order to feed your family. You
call it, “following orders”.
Pig: I’m just doing my job.
Heru: Yes, your job consists of racial profiling, stuck with the view
that the laws apply only to and against Black and poor people. Your job
consists of being a criminal.
Pig: I am not a criminal.
Heru: Without so-called crime, you wouldn’t have a job, your family
could not be fed, you would still be in the lower class. Thus, it’s in
your best interest to never arrest the real criminals, like the ones who
just drove by in that Bentley doing 92 in a 65.
Pig: I am only trying to make society safe.
Heru: If you was trying to make society safe, you would attack the
problem at the primary cause of crime, the plutocrats, not at the
effect, the reactionary responders to plutocrat crimes.
Pig: Anything else? Because you’re only shifting blame here.
Heru: If you wanted to be tough on crime, you would begin by being tough
on poverty and CIPWS systematic miseducation, but doing such means being
tough on your plutocrat bosses, and ending plutocracy would lead to an
end of capitalism, which feeds your family.
Pig: I’m not understanding anything you’re saying
Heru: Of course not, you’re too thoroughly CIPWS miseducated, myopic,
and stuck in your uniform privilege to see egalitarianism.
Pig: But how will I feed my family?
Heru: Being a slave patroller is not about feeding your family, it’s
about feeding your inculcated CIPWS narcissism and so-called
superiority.
Pig: What?
Heru: You get paid to harass, abuse, brutalize, lynch, oppress, and
occupy poor and Black people. If that’s how you feed your family, you
are no better than a street thug. You should begin by arresting
yourself.
Pig: For what…
Heru: For your crimes against the people in the name of capitalism. For
being a Plutocrat Imperialist Goon.
“[Our purpose is] to ensure that literature and art fit well into the
whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as
powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking
and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy
with one heart and one mind.” (1)
This feature, “The Culture Corner,” is a space designated to
highlight and share cultural content that expresses revolutionary ideals
and principles. “The Culture Corner” appears in the newsletter Power
Moves, an internal newsletter distributed in certain Texas prisons,
and is being reprinted here.
In 2024, the hip-hop genre has evolved to be the most influential
genre of music in the world. As such, it is incumbent upon
revolutionaries to utilize this genre to express revolutionary ideals
and to advance revolutionary consciousness and solidarity.
One artist that has done this prolifically, while steadfastly
maintaining a revolutionary nationalist and anti-capitalist political
line, is Bay Area lyrical comrade The Revolutionary Eseibio The
Automatic.
Just as important as eir content, in my view, is the accessibility of
the music to the captive population. In the prison climate today,
dominated by tablet devices with their purposely indoctrinating content,
Eseibio’s content does its job by providing a revolutionary alternative.
Eir content can be accessed on J-pay/Securus tablets on the media store
app. Simply search music and type the artist’s name as spelled above.
Eseibio has an extensive catalog of music, spanning over a decade worth
of material with a wide number of albums and mixtapes.
While all of Eseibio’s material is revolutionary with an underground
flavor, there are certain albums and songs that stick out more than
others. These include the albums “Black Panther” and “African
Revolutionary”. The former’s tracklist reads like a history lesson on
the Black Panther Party. Standout tracks like “10 Point Program,” “Hands
Off Assata,” “Red Book,” “Letter to Afeni,” “Smile 4 Pac,” “Off the
Pigs,” and “George Jackson Day of the Gun” are bangers that also educate
the listener. Other standout tracks like “Juche,” “Che Guevara,” “Bust A
Cap,” “Kwame Nkrumah,” “Black Boots,” “In Defense of Self-Defense,”
“Free The Land,” “Free Em All,” and “C.R.E.A.M-Capitalism Rules
Everything Around Me” should be in steady rotation.
Most important of all is that Eseibio, and other artists that shall
be featured in “The Culture Corner” in the future, provide a platform
for political prisoners to bring brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers
who were left by the wayside into the revolutionary movement. It is not
good enough to complain of the maneuvers of the enemy. We have to be
good at improvising on the new realities. This is only one way of mixing
up the necessary improvisation.
A clenched fist salute to The Revolutionary Eseibio The Automatic and
all other revolutionary and conscious artists using their talents for
the advancement of the class and national struggles.
“The Culture Corner” will put the spotlight on other artists in
future issues, We recommend you to go check out the comrade Eseibio.
Notes: (1) Mao-Tse-Tung’s Selected Works III p.84, “Talks at
the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art.”
A guy walked into special housing on HCON [High Security Maximum
Control Unit] in 2022 with a head swollen to the size of a bowling ball,
with skin hanging off deep face wounds above his eyebrow. He could
barely walk. After the shield team beat him in the cell, then in the
hallway on camera, they took him to medical and chained him to a table
before beating him in front of the doctor and nurse.
Then they took him to the dry-cell and put his head against a
concrete bench (like a chopping block) in a kneeling position and began
beating and kicking him in the head. One officer beat him on the ass
with a night-stick. Then they stomped him out of consciousness. When he
awoke they were still beating him. They left him there for about two
hours til shift-change.
Right before shift-change they walked him back down the hall, past
the nurse station where a second-shift nurse spotted the offender and
asked what happened to him because he didn’t look like that when he went
into the dry-cell. The Sergeant Wilson tried to make excuses but
nevertheless the nurse had another assessment report done.
The guy was put in a special-housing cell next to mine. At
shift-change the replacing sergeant who happened to be at competition
with Sergeant Wilson for a lieutenant position reported the prisoner’s
conditions to the Administration and Operating Lieutenant.
When the Lieutenant arrived the prisoner refused to take pictures –
until I told him to take the pictures and go to medical. The prisoner
was later taken to outside medical and diagnosed with a concussion and
broken temple bone in his skull.
I myself and many other captives coached this prisoner with legal
advice but he refused to appeal the grievance to step 3 in an attempt to
arrange a deal with administration to be released from HCON status. He
was not released.
In the process the Sergeant Wilson was transferred along with several
other officers and one was fired. Shortly after being placed to work in
the gate-house away from prisoners Sergeant Wilson quit. Only one of the
officers is still here which is one too many.
This prisoner basically saved the officers by refusing to speak with
the Warden about the incident or write statements. The prisoner later
stated that writing a grievance or statement is snitching, but as I
mentioned above he wrote both a grievance and statement, only to turn
around and sell himself short, copping pleas and leaving everyone else
hanging; while he turns his back and blind eye to fellow comrades who
will suffer the same fate from these officers, he sold us out and left
us to the wolves for false promises and that’s not what brothers do.
Real brothers wouldn’t let any abuser anywhere near their brothers or
sisters. Those were cynical decisions without revolutionary
consciousness for the betterment of the people, the same people who
helped him to medical treatment when he was lying on his deathbed.
Why settle to copping deals with the same foes who watched orders
being carried out to kick your head in? I’m not taking anything from
this prisoner’s will to self-sacrifice for others, but on an overall
standpoint collectively concerning the prison population, the message
here is,
“Don’t knock others for their foresight in advancing the people by
any means necessary, including pen and paper.” -The Ballot or the
Bullet, Malcolm X
Snitching:
As long as what you say does not include someone else it is not
snitching.
Giving a hint that someone did something is dry snitching.
Collaborating: 1. Siding with, taking up for, or
covering up for the police.
The generations before us put in decades of paperwork to get where we
are today. They wrote newspaper publishers and fought for things we take
for granted like bail, trials, showers and recreation etc. Nothing is
final until it’s on paper. Any legal case won becomes precedent
(law).
Last, police yourselves (nations, neighborhoods, etc). The reason
overall Brothers in Islam are more righteous is because we police
ourselves to keep each other in-line. If the brothers’ gambling and
breaking bread on our watch then we are just as guilty.
In Under Lock & Key 83, my article Ruchell
Magee was published with the line:
“He would later impregnate her before his demise, with a son his
mother would deny. A son that would grow into a polar opposite of George
Jackson.”
This was a mistake as i intended to write that Jonathan Jackson’s son
looks like a polarized version of George Jackson. This was merely a
reference to the son’s appearance.