Taking ownership of censorship
Who is being censored? We are.
It is our newspaper, "MIM Notes" that is the most censored newspaper in Amerikkka; yet, many of us in MIM and MIM circles continue to speak of this as only censorship of prisoners. While it is true that prisoners are being censored, it is also true that anyone who has written for MIM Notes is being censored.
Usually in fact, the word "censorship" applies to the persyn trying to speak, not the persyn listening. Hence, when a prison administration does not allow MIM Notes into the prison, it is MIM Notes writers--people outside the walls--who are being censored in that instance.
Many of us writing for MIM are in fact tax-payers essentially being told that we do not have a right to speak with prisoners while others do. We who write for MIM are often less interested in suburban, conformist people who could not think a radical thought if they tried. That is one reason why we want to speak to prisoners. We have something to say to prisoners. If a suburbanite picks up a MIM Notes and has no reaction that is not surprising. However, when prisoners pick up MIM Notes and do not get to read it because prison administrations take it away, this has a disproportionately negative effect on MIM speakers.
MIM has something to say to everybody, but the social groups most interested in our line are oppressed nations, students and the lumpenproletariat. People in prison generally count as lumpenproletariat and this group has few illusions about the state. Indeed, many of the writers in MIM Notes belong to these groups that also read the MIM Notes.
President George W. Bush is not being censored in prisons despite his philosophy of violence as demonstrated in his bombing of Iraq. Censorship of newspapers quoting Bush or endorsing him or his opponent who also favored the war in Iraq--Gore--these papers and television stations are not so often censored. Hence when prison wardens say we should be censored for threatening "security" through our "philosophy of violence," they are attempting selectively to oppose violence of the oppressed and exploited. In addition, prison wardens are contradicting the stated beliefs of the authors of the "Declaration of Independence" and Abraham Lincoln, who said explicitly in his first inaugural address that the people have a "revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow" the government. (www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html) Prison wardens are not being censored and MIM has not heard of free bible societies being censored in prison. In fact this censorship is inherent to the injustice system as the Mumia Abu-Jamal case proves. The prosecutor against Mumia named Joseph Farill pointed to Mumia's quoting from Mao Zedong that "political power grows out of a barrel of a gun" as evidence against Mumia in his court case. Meanwhile, MIM has yet to hear of anyone being accused by prosecutors of distributing the New York Times despite its backing of numerous wars and coups and quoting from people like George Bush Sr. and Jr. who bombed Iraq. Quoting Mao can be used against someone in a murder case, but reading, quoting or re-distributing violent bourgeois rulers is not ever used as evidence. As a matter of compromise, MIM would agree not to send its present literature to a prison if a prison warden concerned with rehabilitation only allowed pacifist literature into prison. We would accept that as a principled compromise, but there is no prison warden proposing or implementing such a policy.
The failure to recognize the attack of the state is not acceptable amongst communists and anti-imperialists. Failure of MIM and affiliated people to say that both we outside the walls and the people inside the walls are being censored is an example of anemic activism guided by mistaken observer status. We should not be observers in our own repression. It is we who should be striking back at the state aggressively and taking a leadership role in fighting censorship of MIM Notes.
[Resolution 2]
Keeping track of censorship
Tracking the struggle overall
The MIM-led prison struggle needs a gauge of success and failure and this should not be left to prisoners. The masses outside the walls are not likely to ever know all the details of life in the prisons and even party members and prisoners need some way to sum up and track what is going on. We must be the ones to generalize what is going on and tell the people outside the walls.
Toward this end, Congress mandates the following tasks for the prison ministry to be completed within three months for publication in MIM Notes.
1) A list of states that have prisons that have prevented a prisoner from receiving MIM Notes or MIM Theory in the last year. This list will be broken into two parts. One part will list the failures. The other will list states where prisoners do receive the publications If all 50 states have censored MIM in the last year, then so be it: we still expect to see the list of all 50 states in MIM Notes.
2) A list of states that have prisons that have prevented MIM from sending a book for any reason to a prisoner in the last year.
3) A list of states (if any) which MIM has given up on sending literature to prisons in.
4) A listing of federal prisons by name that have prevented MIM Notes or MIM Theory from going to any prisoner in the past year.
We also want that this list be updated at least every six months and published in the MIM Notes with the objective of replacing the insipid "humyn-rights" reports of Amnesty International etc. This resolution reminds comrades that they are the leaders, not Amnesty, not Americas Watch, not the UN etc. It is up to us to define the problem and agitate against it on our own terms. We find no acceptable reasons for prisoners to be denied MIM Notes and MIM Theory, so we are going to accumulate our own list of regular humyn-rights violations by state. We also encourage the prison ministry to come up with any additional lists that allow people to track the struggle from month to month and year to year. This exposure needs to be continuous and repeated, so that people who only glance at MIM Notes from time to time will be reminded where things are at in the prisons struggle in an overall way, just as they are reminded in an overall way of the imprisonment rate by the dead-ad blurb already running in every issue. We stress that we want to present complete information, and not just information on individual prisons or prisoners. We want these lists to present the overall continental situation and run in MIM Notes at regular intervals.
Contact MIM by writing mim@mim.org