Under Lock & Key

The recent Zionist attacks on Rafah signaled to the world that the imperialists are in lock step as they cut a hideous path of genocide through Palestine. U.$. imperialism has given the nod and wink to forge ahead as we all watch, as we all mourn.

The imperialists have circled the wagons despite the world responding in disgust. The people should also come together, all sectors here in the internal semi-colonies also known as the United Snakes.

Of special interest is two sectors who defy the pull of capitalist bribes. This defiance arrives from different paths and yet our party feels they are both anti-imperialist in nature. These sectors in the United $tates are the prison movement – made up of prisoners, former prisoners and outside supporters, and the other sector being the student movement – being the students on school campuses across the country.

These two sectors have the least to lose and the most to win when it comes to revolution. Both bring that passion and fire needed to ignite the flame of real resistance and thus should find ways to resist in tandem.

A free Palestine, like a free Aztlán, will only happen when anti-imperialism is exercised in a united front between all oppressed and allies. The world sees that Palestine is deserving of peace, for it is life while Israel signifies death!

The student encampments that were attacked by the state and their goons were a glimmer of hope that the youth here in these false U.$. borders hold on to their humynity in the face of repression. Standing up for the national liberation of Palestine, putting their freedom and their lives on the line so that the Israeli settler colonialists stop the attacks on Palestine.

Chican@s stand with Palestine because we are also colonized by imperialists. The Chican@ nation stands with the students who dare to struggle. Imprisoned Aztlán awaits our student allies in the concentration kamps so we can build and solidify our struggle with a common political enemy.

The Chican@ movement struggles against imperialism too, we stand up to settler colonialism, and genocide as well. Imperialism is what creates the conditions where kids in cages is normalized whether we are talking about in U.$. prisons or Israeli prisons.

We have a moral obligation to stand against the genocide in Palestine. We are obligated as conscious people to stand with oppressed people always.

Power to the people!

Everyone has been watching the atrocities happening on the news and the genocide going down in the Middle East. Israel seems to think that Palestinian lives mean nothing. Many are shocked at how the news describes the situation as if Palestine is in conflict when it’s clear that Israel has reduced Palestine to rubble.

Not one persyn here has felt Israel is in the right. It is clear as day that a genocide is happening and that U.$. tax payers are complicit as the U.$. sends billions of dollars to Israel every year.

Every time the news comes on talking about Israel, one of the prisoners here yells, “Yo Israel, get the fuck out of Palestine!” Everyone claps in agreement. Some are bewildered as to why the U.$. is enabling genocide and the more conscious are explaining the history of Amerika and what it has done to this continent and beyond for the dollar. Humyn lives are worth more than profit and the courageous students in their encampments are proving that! To be arrested in a time of genocide is an honorable thing to do.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
10 May 2024
PG-13

Spoilers

A main theme throughout both series of Planet of the Apes movies is the question of whether Apes differ from so-called “humyn nature.” In the first series (produced 1968-1972) especially, humyn nature is blamed for the hubris of nuclear weapons that brings humyns’ downfall. In this latest movie of the new series (produced 2011-2024), apes have been setback in this search for truth, but perhaps this can be explained by the very existence of class struggle that they share with humyns.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024), the fourth film in the modern Planet of the Apes film series, is the first to take us into the future a few generations after the events that led Apes to become competitors with humyns for dominating planet Earth. In it we see glimpses of the emergence of class society, in the form of slavery. But it is a slave society that is shaped by a relationship to the formerly dominant humyns that still reflects a colonial relationship in many ways.

The Eagle Clan, who are the center of the film, live in a primitive clan society, with elders who set the laws that are taught to the young and passed down via tradition. Later in the film, we encounter a larger ape society that is a kingdom led by King Proximus, that has absorbed many clans and uses them as slaves. It is not clear that the slaves produce material wealth for the slavemaster class of the kingdom, as the film only shows them working to break into an old humyn military bunker to extract the technology. But someone must be producing the food, tools and weapons for the soldiers who run the kingdom.

Proximus claims to be the new Caesar. Caesar was the founder and leader of the apes in the first three movies, and was also a king figure. But Caesar was a benevolent leader who fought and worked alongside the others. A virus gave Caesar super-ape intelligence to lead the apes to liberation from humyn society.

Within 10 years of the events of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Caesar had already begun to learn that apes have the same tendencies as humyns as he had to ally with a humyn to combat a rogue ape attempting to usurp eir control of ape city to wage war on humyns.

We previously discussed the themes of integrationism in the newer series, in contrast to the older series that takes a more scientific approach to uniting humyns and apes through struggle and re-education. While the inability of apes to build a a lasting harmonious society may appear pessimistic, we’d say it is realistic; accurately reflecting the myth of humyn or ape nature despite the producers’ intentions.

The original series (produced 1968-1972) ends with a humyn ally remarking that the apes have finally become humyn after the first ape murder of another ape. This story line is framed more as a biblical original sin story than class struggle. But in both series the first ape-on-ape murder occurs because of the struggle between the apes who want to wage war to annihilate all humyns and those who do not. The question the producers seem to be asking is do apes have a war-like nature like humyns supposedly do. Despite the revolutionary themes of the first series, it largely reinforces this concept of humyn nature.

When we criticize the concept of humyn/ape nature, we are not criticizing the “natural” we are criticizing the metaphysical view of an unchanging phenomenon. In other words, “natural” itself is a myth in many ways, in other ways “natural” could be dialectical materialism and the scientific method that explains the world around is. As dialectical materialists we understand all things to be in a constant state of change motivated by the contradictions within that thing; the class struggle in society being the prime example of this in Marxist thought.

Observed by humyns in our reality, chimpanzees and gorillas have one leader who is a male silverback. While bonobos have an alpha male role as well, the alpha female plays the more determinate role. Interestingly, the king Proximus is a male bonobo. Meanwhile orangutans in real life tend to be more solitary, which is reflected in this film with Racka being a loner and no other orangutans being part of Proximus’s kingdom. As we know, and as Engels lays out in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, humyns have gone through various social structures; from more collective matriarchal societies to the more modern hierarchical patriarchal societies, and these structures have changed to adapt to changing modes of production.

In our world, we suspect humyn societies have changed more over the last ten thousand years than other great apes, because their relationship to the rest of the natural world has changed more through gaining knowledge and technology. Therefore in the new series of movies we would expect apes to go through a very similar evolution of hierarchies and class society as humyns did as they change their relationship to the production of their material needs. This is reflected in the kingdom that operates as a primitive system of slavery, the earliest class system of humyns as well.

However, the evolution of ape society is colored by the existence of a previous, advanced humyn society. Learning from humyn books and accessing humyn armories full of technology are ways that Proximus attempts to make a leap in ape knowledge and technology. As ey does this, Proximus maintains a line that humyns cannot be trusted, and apes must work together, even though this is applied cynically as ey is shown to happily sacrifice the lives of many apes in eir own attempts at power through humyn technology.

The main character in Kingdom is Noa, a member of the Eagle Clan, whose father was a master of training eagles. Noa learns about Caesar for the first time from the last true follower of Caesar after the rest of the Eagle Clan has been captured by Proximus. Before this, Noa had no knowledge of the history of humyns or apes; perhaps because of eir age. But Noa also states that eir elders did not want to know such things and remained ignorant on purpose through isolation.

The major transformation that Noa makes is to reject the idea that law is handed down from some higher power. Ey does this overtly by rejecting the laws of the king, and more subtly by pursuing knowledge eir elders forbid. This is the transformation of thought that humyn society went through during its transition to capitalism, when liberalism, plurality, democracy and the pursuit of scientific knowledge rose to replace ways of thought that were more stagnant, based more in idealism and following a god-king. So we see Noa make a shift towards materialism, that we expect will transform the Eagle Clan as it rebuilds its village. But Noa’s understanding of ape nature at the end of the movie still seems behind that of Caesar’s, generations ago. We see this type of pre-scientific thinking among our comrades today who believe the white man is literally the devil and the Black man/humyn is god. Like Noa, they’re on the right side, but are guided by idealist thinking that can easily lead them astray. Of course, we all struggle with idealism and subjectivism, which might be considered part of the “nature” of beings that can reason with limited knowledge and perspective. Part of the power of the vanguard party, as layed out by Lenin, is its ability to produce a more scientific approach to social change by pooling experience and knowledge production at group level for a whole class.

In our review of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) we compare the Caesar loyalists to the Gang of Four in China, who were those in the leadership who both understood and represented the Maoist line after Mao’s death. The Orangutan, Raka, would be like a young persyn in China today who has deeply studied Mao and Chinese history but has no real experience in building socialism and no one to help em put into practice. Proximus might be compared to the revisionists in power in China, exploiting the people while trying to strengthen China against the U.$. imperialists all in the name of “Marxism” (or “Caesar”).

The problem that Noa faces in determining what the right path is, and what Caesar was really about, becomes a question of trust and judging what is morally right. In contrast, we can judge the correct Maoist path by studying history, and putting science into practice. While Noa’s path in this movie echoes Caesar’s in the previous one, this is only because they both tried to help their own people. While serving the people is part of the communist road, we must be more than do-gooders to end oppression, we must have a scientific understanding of society, what forces are at play within it, how it is changing and how we can shape that change.

In practice it seems that Noa may have acted against the interests of Apes overall by eir alliance with the humyn, Mae. Another sequel will probably reveal this. This is where the colonial parallels come in. Mae is part of a humyn society that is no longer dominant, but still possesses historical knowledge and technology that gives them a great advantage. The Eagle Clan parallels many primitive groups in humyn history that have encountered colonialists and allied with them against other known enemies, perhaps seeing the colonialists as friends and allies, before being subjugated by them in turn. In this way Proximus proves more correct in eir distrust of the humyns and calls for ape unity, despite coming from an exploiter class perspective.

This is why in a United Front the proletariat needs its own party to represent our class, and to act independently of other classes. It must be a party based on science, that can see all sides of the situation. At this slave stage of ape society there is no such leadership available and therefore no basis for forming principled alliances with either the humyns or the exploiter class of apes.

The movie ends with Noa asking Mae if humyns and apes can ever live together in trust. The ending hints that such a future is far off to say the least. A theme that was more prominent in the original series is the political question of if the oppressed rise up against white Amerika, will they wipe out white Amerika or live harmoniously side-by-side. In the original series, we see many years after the ape revolution that such a reality is still in the works. There is still distrust, as some war-mongering humyns still exist in the city, and many apes remember the past oppression by humyns. While we draw some analogies above about the latest movie, there are no real revolutionary story lines like the original series, which showed the joint dictatorship of other great apes over humyns and discussed the need for a long period of transforming society and its citizens to build the trust necessary for peaceful coexistence. Of course, the dictatorship of the proletariat is not just about trust building, it is about continuing the class struggle to eliminate all class differences – the internal contradictions of society that lead to oppressive relationships between groups. That is the only basis upon which a true communist society can be built. Something none of the Planet of the Apes movies have brought us to yet.

<sup>Notes:
1. Wiawimawo, August 2011, Prison Themes Central to New Planet of the Apes Story, Under Lock & Key Issue 23.
2. Wiawimawo, July 2014, Maoist Movie Review: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Under Lock & Key Issue 40.
3. Wiawimawo, July 2017, War for All of Apekind Trumps Revenge, Under Lock & Key Issue 58</sup>

Greetings, I want to extend my support and appreciation for you courageous students who stand against the tyranny of genocide.

Your acts and resistance have been well-received around the world and deeply appreciated by Palestinian refugees, as I seen it on the world news, painted on the walls of the refugee camps: “Thank you American students”.

Israel is not fighting Hamas, Israel is creating a Palestinian genocide. The greatest hypocrisy in history, just as the Nazis did to the Jews.

In prison we stand in solidarity with your good cause of saving innocent lives.

Hip hop artist Macklemore released a song and music video, called “Hind’s Hall”, unapologetically supporting the students fighting to stop U.$. funding of genocide in Palestine. This is a unique statement that we have not seen from Amerikan celebrities after over six months of bombing and invasion.

Besides saying “fuck the police” and “free Palestine”, to the question of voting for Biden, Macklemore says “fuck no” in this song. This last point puts em ahead of the so-called Communist Party - U$A and Revolutionary Communist Party - U$A, which have both implicitly and explicitly campaigned for Democratic presidential candidates, including Joe Biden. We’d say Macklemore is doing a better job of representing the interests of the Third World proletariat on this point, than the so-called communist parties. In the past Macklemore has sported an Amerikan flag, and campaigned for the Democrats as well. But ey’re an individual, and a rapper. We gotta expect a little more from a communist party that is supposed to be a source of truth and to lead us to ending oppression.

Of course, the MIM slogan has been “Don’t Vote, Organize!” So not voting for Biden in itself isn’t the call for change; rather the recognition of the need to make and change history ourselves instead of casting a vote for this or that celebrity politician.

While it took 6 months and U.$. student protests for this song to come out, it appears that Macklemore has been involved in the anti-war movement since October when ey signed a statement supporting ceasefire. Ey is also donating all proceeds to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. So good for em, and it is a good thing to use eir voice as a popular artist to reach more people. We hope this cracks open the door for other more popular artists who have been quiet on the genocide.

In the new song, Macklemore also asks “who gets the right to defend? who gets the right to resistance?” flashing pictures from Ukraine and answering that it has to do with skin pigment. This is a righteous defense of the resistance in Palestine that is condemned as terrorism by the same people chearleading the resistance in Ukraine as a natural humyn right. However, skin color is a superficial explanation. Though racism, orientalism, and anti-Arab sentiment is a strong driving force behind the average oppressor-nation Amerikkkan’s stance on Palestine, ultimately the U.$.’s position derives not from disdain for certain skin colors but rather from imperialism. Ukraine, and Zelensky, stand as a junior partner to Amerikkka against their current greatest imperialist enemy, Russia, while the potential of a freed Palestine poses a threat to Amerikkkan and I$raeli imperialism in the Middle East.

Students at Columbia University occupied Hamilton Hall after the university rejected most of their demands, including to divest from weapons manufacturers. During the occupation, they renamed it “Hind’s Hall” after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza City while trying to get assistance from the Red Crescent Society after her family had been killed by an Israeli attack.

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 its 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:

1. Made it harder for city officials, state politicians, and local residents to ignore their oppression;

2. They’ve won over neighbors to their work, elevated consciousness around air pollution and the complicity of the occupying government in environmental destruction;

3. They’ve garnered meetings with state regulators, and the fact that the head of 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;

4. The aspirations of their movement have rose. 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 Ally 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.

I$rael’s war on Palestine is without a doubt a genocide.

There has been a groundswell of support from people around the world that conclude that the settler state of I$rael needs to be brought to justice and that Amerika has given the “greenlight” for the genocide to ensue.

At a recent protest over I$rael bombing an Iranian consulate in Syria, killing several Iranian military intelligence personnel, Hamas responded with a statement saying among other things that Amerika has given the green light for this bombing by not denouncing it. We would agree and go further by stating that Amerika has green-lit genocide since it first arrived here in Turtle Island over 500 years ago.

It strikes us that the world would be shocked that Amerika would stand by in the face of the genocide happening to Palestine when Chican@s, First Nations and New Afrikans know first hand that the United $tates is not only a client but a pathfinder in the realm of genocidal settlerism. We should remember it was Amerika who inspired the likes of Hitler in honing his genocidal craft, an evaluation of evidence supports our point.

In the mire of the oppression being rained down on Palestine, especially with I$rael assassinating those it has targeted even in other countries – or in embassies! – we just glean what lessons are available as the world gets a bold example of what colonization looks like today.

If we are in fact at the conclusion that Amerika – who aids I$rael in billions of aid each year – is giving a wink and a nod to assassinating government officials of sovereign countries, it poses the question: how might revolutionaries here in the imperialist center of the world prepare and respond?

We should start by understanding that in today’s world genocide arrives via stages of development by the imperialist agencies. These stages are 1) Intelligence. 2) Analysis. 3) Logistics and 4) Operations. What we are seeing happen is war plans, whether we are talking about the streets of Gaza or the barrios of Califaztlan it all starts with intel.

The oppressor nation identifies its threats and its assets – on the ground or online. Because we are in the stage of building public opinion here in the United $tates we can be vulnerable to data mining that is employed by agencies globally. Search bots that are known as “spiders” search the internet 24/7 mining through open source material and all public records to find any links to revolutionary data, i.e. people, groups or theory. They snatch everything: Facebook posts, chat rooms, blogs, news stories, financial records, visa applications, etc… which can all be harvested quickly on a daily basis, programs like starlight or spire can then sift, cross reference and separate non-essential material while then targeting links that lead back to intended targeted people or groups within the movement. In this way the state is able to closely monitor not only a movement’s vanguard but anything that metastasizes out of the movement as well, that is everything in its realm of influence. Once data is comprised. with the help of programs like Analyst Notebook, it reveals the internal structure of an organization and its international links as well. All of this intel helps the oppressor nation develop its genocidal programs which not only furthers its own interests but the interests of its allies like the settler state of I$rael.

Here in the occupied territories that some call Amerika, the internal semi-colonies have long known about Amerika’s stance on genocide. Chican@s and other oppressed nations who languish in the prisons, in the control units, and on Death Row overstand that Amerika green-lights genocide. The Brown and Black people, gunned down every day by Amerikan police know this as well. The Chican@ nation and other oppressed know because our land and resources are occupied and controlled by the capitalists who neutralize us when we threaten the occupation.

End The Genocide!