Note: "Our circles" refer to the comrades on the outside that correspond with and organize prisoners. This includes comrades from a wide range of political commitments.
Last year, particularly after the 2nd EAL Month, I started to re-evaluate the ULK Campaign. It was obvious that prisoners were not participating or being led to participate and that our circles for the most part were ignoring a continent-wide campaign. The reason I had volunteered to be PM was because there was some serious stagnation in an area where such a huge portion of our supporters could be led forward. Though it's a different type, we reached another level of stagnation starting more than a year ago.
Later in the winter, I read Collier's book and several essays by Mao on leadership. In thinking about the successes and failures of prison ministry work over the last few years, I've concluded one main thing. For our prison ministry work to progress, there needs to be better leadership. Maybe that's simplistic, but this means exerting a different type of energy in leadership and pushing to be more creative to involve people better at different levels. Primarily, this means leadership on my part -- or on the part of a more qualified prison minister. As a result of a better leader at the head of the prison ministry, our circles should in turn be better able to organize and recruit prisoners into action. The recent agitation self-criticism should improve the party's leadership in the areas of prisons, but current stagnation will continue without improved PM leadership, regardless of new and improved line. So the S-C is a step forward, but we still need to back track and understand some of our weaknesses.
Leadership/getting other leaders inspired to take initiative
Mao's essays about party committees refer to top leaders needing to fine-tune the training of other leaders that then go out and lead the masses in struggle. Our prison ministry is set up this way. When we have failures, the first place to start in evaluation is whether or not the leaders have been given enough political direction, education, information and correct examples to effectively lead among the masses. The current primer defines the Prison Minister as more of bureaucrat than leader. But the prison minister should be held responsible for leading those that then go out and lead in turn.
For quite some time I had thought that the main problem was lack of cohesion among our circles and people not following directions and communiqus. Eventually, I pretty much gave up on giving out suggestions for tasks because it seemed that few read them or implemented them. Some of our comrades would ask me for things that prisoners can do or that their prisoner correspondence group could do, after a while my response was merely to go read the archives. Though I address the need for better cohesion below, this problem primarily deals with whether or not the leader is able to inspire our circles into making progress. If there is one overwhelming need throughout our work, the leader needs to be able to explain the need and the methods of work to accomplish a solution. If people are asking for new ideas to address different demands, it is the leader's responsibility to lead them into action in the areas that they are interested in.
People were clammering for more leadership. Though they did not state it that way, they were. Instead of providing them with newer and more creative ways to mobilize and the tools to do so, I would stick them back with a response like "If you were paying attention, there is a list of undone tasks that you could look at and help with." This is a conservative response. It contributed in limiting our work instead of expanding it.
Here is one example that characterizes a lot of the things I was doing incorrectly in terms of leading: We have a great need for people willing to do legwork on the legalities of prison oppression and prisoner rights. For quite some time, we have had the opportunity of utilizing people who have knowledge of the laws of the united snakes. But the results have been almost non-existent. I came up with several things that such a person could do, thinking then that all that was left was for a legal expert to jump in and take on the tasks that I had set out. Originally, I was thinking that it was all on these comrades' shoulders that the tasks I had set out were not accomplished. But now I realize that as the PM, my job is really to find what it is that they are interested in or how I can inspire them to take on the tasks that we need done. I can't just throw the tasks at them and expect it to get done. It's idealism to expect CC-level commitment from everyone in our circles. Further, it shows how or why we have been unable to organize similar potential supporters that are even further away from the party i.e. lawyers that only have tactical unity with MIM.
For quite some time I have been criticizing different comrades when I see that they blame prisoners for lack of work. When a person says that the prisoners are not doing X, then I have told them that it is because we are not showing them how etc [Part of this is due to our ability as an organization to find things the masses are excited about. See below.] But I did not take this same attitude toward people in our circles. Instead I said that we can't have a masses are asses line on prisoners; but that it's ok to have that attitude about our circles. Our circles recruiting prisoners include many different types of comrades -- from HCs, degenerated MCs, MCs, CCs, RCs etc It's idealist to think that even if I were coming up with 100% correct instructions that our circles would immediately latch onto the ideas and implement them. Most people still need to see the reason, they need to be inspired in a revolutionary way etc I was not connecting the dots so that they would follow through. The question boils down to this: If those you are leading are not excited about doing what you ask or taking on projects you start, then is it their fault or yours? A leader needs to first look at what he/she is doing wrong in this respect.
Agitation S-C should boost our PM work
It should be clear to say that the recent self-criticism changed our goal in organizing work. Specifically, where we were telling people to building public opinion and independent institutions, we now are telling people to take on tasks to change immediate conditions. This is no small change. And it's a change that should, if handled correctly, rally the prisoner masses into action -- as well as those in our circles who are at different levels.
When I state above that it's the PM's responsibility to inspire people, it includes many things. Part of that is educating them as to why they should take on tasks or campaigns. But what the S-C brings out is that we need to correctly analyze demands so that we are engaging people in campaigns that they are interested in -- and that serve the i.p.
For years it was our practice to turn away demands to only yielded small reformist results. We told prisoners to look to a larger goal. The reason we gave is that MIM focuses on revolution and the things between here and then can be done by reformists. It was the idea that our party does not have the time or resources to deal with the small and immediate things. We broke this mantra every once in a while with campaigns against censorship, but generally stuck to it. This left people in our circles at a loss for how to lead prisoners to do things that are possible behind bars and things that prisoners were excited about. It's not a universal to pick up on every campaign prisoners suggest, but we have been far too rightist in which ones we publicize or lend validity to. Instead, we tell prisoners to help with MN or MT or recruiting other prisoners into study groups. Though that is ok, it is too easy to just end there.
The reality is that there is a limit to what prisoners can do. Mostly it comes back to writing. But when the whole "review books" mantra came along, it was because one branch had an excess of books and its leading comrade started recruiting h prisoners to do review. Then we all just clung to the idea that prisoners could review books for MIM Theory. This is an example of us leading prisoners to take on projects that MCs should do. It was pragmatism that hit us in the butt because most prisoners could not review books like MCs could and for publication in MT. Sure it helped prisoners' education or political level when they reviewed, but that's more of an "each one teach one" approach than organizing the masses approach.
Accepting the book review trend relates to more general summary of prisons work. I was thinking too broadly about work prisoners should do. Thinking that prisoners need a strong proletarian party, so the 'work' that they should do should compliment MIM's own internal goals. Our trend with prisoners, as was also the trend with RCs, was that we get them to take on tasks that we are doing so that we can then move onto something else. This is wrong. Sure, they can assist us. But we are not building public support for revolution just so that MCs can move onto more interesting things. We are building p.o. so that the masses themselves stand up in their demands and learn to build parts of the United Front.
Instead of thinking about ways that we could lead prisoners into creative new areas of prison-related revolutionary work, I wanted to accomplish the goals that we already set forward -- and then move on. There is nothing wrong with taking things step by step, but this was thwarting the momentum of prisoners. Our job should be to learn ways to lead prisoners into specific directions that answer their own demands. If they don't latch onto a campaign, it's then time to tweak the campaign or figure out what is better.
With prisoners, asking them to do research on various topics is fine. But if that does not get them excited en masse, then we must move them in other ways. It's fine to ask them to summarize education to build more p.o. but at the same time, we should be moving (much) more quickly onto things like replicating actions shown in "The Last Graduation" and rectifying the situation in prisons regarding pell grants.
I don't think that the ULK campaign was entirely wrong. We need prisoners writing about their conditions. It both educates the outside people and enables us as leaders to see what the pressing needs of prisoners are. But I had envisioned people taking the campaign and running with different themes that applied to their local work with prisoners, setting up advancements in the work, not merely having ULK submissions on a given topic. Where the agit S-C comes in is working (much) harder to turn those explanations of conditions into campaigns for education and action in achieving shorter term goals. Continuing work to gather conditions information from prisoners should not be shot out the window. It also helps us to better evaluate priorities when prisoners come to us with ideas for solutions. But the S-C outlines ways that we need to put more energy into the return side of the dialectic: consolidating the information and organizing prisoners around concrete demands.
The example that the self-criticism makes in writing letters to newspapers is a positive one. Here again, we mostly told folks that writing for bourgeois newspaper was not worth it and instead they should write for MIM Notes as the voice of the oppressed. That method of thinking veers too much toward only building the party. We want prisoners to help in building public opinion and why not have them doing that in every newspaper they can get published in? This is just one way that we can lead prisoners to take part in organizing instead of prisoners always being the ones that are the target of organizing. We cannot organize them just into beliefs. They'll degenerate if there is nothing that they can do.
The agitation s-c poses the biggest challenge to our prison ministry work, I think, mostly because of the limitations on what prisoners can do. The question not so far into the future is what we tell prisoners about work stoppages and protests. Currently, we support prisoners who do this, but we do not initiate these actions. But it's a natural outgrowth of organizing people into protests for reforms that we'll need to face. I think we'll soon need to take a different stance on that -- but our problems with censorship have to be addressed first. With censorship as an obstacle that is so prevalent right now, organized strikes or our organizational inability to rally outside masses will only mean that prisoners are met with further repression without the results that should come from staged prison protests.
So what is up with USW?
Another example of ineffectively leading both the prison masses and our circles on the outside deals with USW. The reason that this organization was initiated by MIM was that the prison masses were clamoring for ways that they can participate in MIM or RAIL or the movement in general and many for their own organization. I think our response had the correct label or was somewhat pointed in the correct direction, but the response to prisoners' clamoring was mostly hollow.
In short, I threw an organizational solution to the prison masses, but did not exert more energy to effectively lead our circles or prisoners to utilize "their" organization. Throwing out an organization as a solution is ineffective without good leadership on the political level and the effort to seek creative ways to put prisoners' needs into action. It was merely reiterating the needs of prisoners instead of addressing them. True that prisoners must create their own methods of revolutionary work and it is up to them to seize the opportunities, but I think we ended up stifling them through our lack of leadership.
The recent switch in MIM line toward the inclusion of reformist tactics and the exclusion of "only revolution and Party-building" goes a long way to change our attitudes about leadership. In the past, RAIL and USW were both thought of as partially having the responsibility of being MIM's back bone -- meaning that we would recruit people to do work that MCs could not do, but work that would build the party. Taking into account the recent agitation self-criticism, USW should be allowed to flourish -- given that our leadership shows prisoners how and does not stand in their way. Instead of half-heartedly recruiting them to take on party tasks, we must recruit them to see their spot in the UF and to figure out ways to address immediate conditions. Even the most advanced prisoners will find this useful in their recruitment of other prisoners.
A secondary problem with the utilization of USW as a prisoner mass organization was lack of centralism within our circles. People were consistently fighting over the simple concept that we should be recruiting prisoners. If their dissention had been regarding the concepts surrounding the recent agit self-crit, that would have been useful; but mostly it was a matter of not wanting to implement change out of laziness. Ultimately, as I state above, this is my responsibility in terms of invigorating our circles to go to the next step.
An organization like USW might first start out with primary goals of figuring out the purpose of the organization for later goals, but the movement into extra-organizational goals should be swift. This is not what happened with USW. Instead, I left people with the vague idea that they should just do it. We are not as advanced as that in Amerika. Prisoners have revolutionary consciousness to a point, but experience in organizing politically they do not. I did not provide people in our circles with positive examples or leadership of how they could help prisoners to find their niche in the movement.
General comments
One comrade recently stated that we have made significant steps forward in the prison ministry in recent years. It is true that we have developed a better sense of accountability for prisoners in things like not having stacks of ignored prisoner letters and there has usually been a more consistent stream of submissions from prisoners for MN. We have also made a few attempts, increasingly more successful, to recruit higher level prisoners and also turn the letters from prisoners into recruiting or agitation tools in outside work. We have become more consistent in publicizing prison conditions and building support for prisoner struggles against oppression. The best example of this is when our circles have worked with prisoners to develop articles or posters that go beyond ULK and are used for agitation. It's to the credit of the comrades that have done this and shown this practice in publication in MN or in events.
With the new line in the agit s-c (as well as further discussion of mobilizing middle forces) we should improve our thinking about prisons. But it is still a matter of implementation. There seems to be a lot of disconnect between how people think about working with prisons and the rest of our work. So, I'd suggest studying carefully those docs and working it into prisons work. I've emphasized to prisoners (in my turf) to study the agitation self-criticism and to give feed back and criticism on our prisons practice that is related. With that, I send some campaign info about local outside things that affect prisoners i.e. censorship petitions. That is merely a small way to get prisoners to start thinking that MIM will consider winnable demands they put forward and will start to work with them to accomplish those goals.
More about our circles
The bulk of this is about my own leadership intentionally. But as I am being self-critical about how I lead our circles, I hope that others on the prison list read this and think of the parallel mistakes that they make when they are leading others to work with prisoners or are leading prisoners directly. Whereas I am at fault for not leading in methods of work, that does not mean that others could not step up and take initiative. Leaders can certainly see some of the people in our circles surpass them in energy and initiative. This can in turn keep leaders on their toes and also provide a positive example to other turf leaders on the outside.
My concern is that the agitation s-c is not a magic bullet and should not be seen as that. Yes, we agree that more initiative and creativity must be exerted, more goals to entice middle forces, more winnable demands etc But some of the same problems will persist if people don't take a conscious look at them. For one, the lack of cohesion I talked about deals with centralism. Not everyone working in the prisons ministry has agreed to uphold centralism. However, we have had the problem of comrades who _are_ supposed to be upholding centralism not doing so. For example, not following simple directions about bureaucrat aspects of our work or waiting a year to implement suggestions. The Prisons Minister can work to inspire as I say above, but the lag-time in implementing changes has been ridiculous at times.
I think part of this is attributable to our circles thinking of answering prisoners' letters as a mechanical task. You sit down and go through them to answer the letters. But when would a recruiter on the outside merely meet with a recruit just to have the existence of a meeting? There should be a purpose in letters and that purpose should be recruiting the prisoners into action, into study, and into organizing politically. I still think that there is a trend of not thinking of work with prisoners as recruitment or organizing work, but merely a bureaucrat task. This should be obvious in turfs where prisoners stop writing, where prisoners are not able to move past that initial letter about what facility they are at and the fact that they have no money or that they want books. Obviously there is a wide range of political levels of prisoners, but I highly doubt there is a good reason that any one of our turfs does not have prisoners suggesting and working on campaigns, writing for ULK and working on articles for MN -- the whole broad range of our work.
The most important (currently) area where not following directions hurts us is our work against censorship. There has been a request for a report on censorship within three months. I've had similar requests in the past. Similar in that they require information from all turfs to be most effective. If turfs are ignoring the changes that we made in terms of tracking censorship -- which I have found the bulk of our turfs doing -- then we will not get complete pictures of the censorship. Ultimately, anti-censorship campaigns need to be local. I think the best thing that a PM can do is summarize the general situation as best as possible and to show positive examples with the campaigns. This is something (like much of the prison ministry work) that depends mostly upon turfs participating and doing their part. The prison minister should be able to sum up and say what works and what does not generally. But initiative is essential within our circles, something that needs serious work.
Lastly, as a general note, I have spent too much time arguing with people in our circles about implementing the simplest of things or doing this or that small task. It's my fault when I allow those stupid interactions to continue far, but we have got to realize as well that the prison ministry does have a structure and that not every little detail should be argued out. In reality, there has been more back and forth about whether or not this or that person would do X basic task than debate on the prisons list regarding tactics or work. That speaks to both my leadership ability to steer and facilitate as well as the ultra-democracy and nitpicking within our circles. Both need to change.
Last note
I had originally started writing this for people on the prisons list so that they could give me feedback and help to improve the work of the prison ministry. That process (of writing this) started 6 months ago, dragged on and I was not even able to answer to a comrade who asked for the report a week ago. Since then, I have not provided a lot of leadership in the prisons ministry, nor have I really written anything earth shattering here that will help us make large leaps in prison ministry work. Seeing that it took so long for such a simple statement says to me that our prisons work would be better served by someone that writes such things more easily and that exerts more energy. Also, for the most part, I have a weakness of getting bogged down by people's ultra-democracy or arguments that have little affect on progress. I also don't have a stunning answer to how to congeal prisoners' past desire for USW and it's current stagnation. I also am somewhat stumped about censorship tactics, though I have made some progress on this, taking more initiative is necessary so we get a broader scope of experience to summarize. These are just additions to the general errors I made that are listed above. So, I would vote for another person to become prison minister if there was a person demonstrated more initiative and energy. It's a large ministry and the person leading it needs to be very well organized. At this particular time, I am not that well organized honestly. At least not enough to meet what my ideal of a minister should be in order to be most effective. Barring that, I would like to see what I have suggested before -- parceling out of the ministry where possible. Either the solution of a better minister or breaking down some of the responsibilities would help us a lot. When I say breaking down some of the responsibilities, it includes things that I have listed that I have not done well. Most importantly showing positive examples to get our circles moving. Whether it remains the status quo with me as PM or not, turfs setting the pace on different campaigns, showing what can be done and how needs to be spread out more. I made the error of throwing my hands up in the air when I saw little initiative and am working to correct that through this essay, but the Prison Minister needs to be able to churn out ideas that our circles will be excited about better than I have demonstrated to this point.
Contact MIM by writing mim@mim.org