MIM(Prisons) is a cell of revolutionaries serving the oppressed masses inside U.$. prisons, guided by the communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
Under Lock & Key is a news service written by and for prisoners with a focus on what is going on behind bars throughout the United States. Under Lock & Key is available to U.S. prisoners for free through MIM(Prisons)'s Free Political Literature to Prisoners Program, by writing:
MIM(Prisons) PO Box 40799 San Francisco, CA 94140.
Organizations in Occupied Turtle Island organizing under the label of
Palestine solidarity take various tactics and ideological positions. A
great portion of these efforts are negative, representing leftist
organization-building and guilt-soothing for populations who benefit
from imperialism.(1)
Still, there is much to be appreciated in Palestine solidarity
organizing. The fact that as a class, U.$. workers are wedded to
imperialism as a labor aristocracy(2) does not mean that select
individuals and segments of the same class, such as youth, immigrants
and members of oppressed nations, don’t have a righteous impulse to
rebel against genocide.(3) Further, drawing the line between practicing
manufactured discontent to gain social capital (for example, peaceful,
permitted and policed “solidarity” marches, or gathering social media
clout) versus genuine rebellion (involving significant self-sacrifice)
can be a difficult strategic question and a complicated moral matter.
It’s the job of communists to answer these questions, drawing those who
can be allied in a united front under the leadership of the global
proletariat.
In the United $tates, only small percentages of the country ever will
protest for progressive causes, and usually only a few thousand people
are liable to turn up at anti-imperialist protests, if we’re lucky. But
even this small size of protest crowds can be confusing. We see large
events put on in the name of helping Palestine and, ignoring the lack of
ideological unity required for such crowds, perceive that there is a
strong movement against genocide here. To move how? Against which
genocide? You’ll find that the larger the event, the less likely it is
for such questions to be answered.
Let’s examine one specific way this numbers game is lost among the
U.$. left. A very common protest narrative goes something like this: X
city/institution is partnering with Israel. That partnership uses funds
which could otherwise be spent “on our community” (healthcare, jobs,
public resources). Therefore, we must divest from Israel and invest back
into “our community”. The messaging behind agitational work tells the
organizers, audience and onlookers at protests the purpose and goals of
the work: they represent the ideology pushing our practice forwards.
Here, this oft-repeated messaging about divestment explains that
everyone should join the cause to reclaim what is theirs from an immoral
misappropriation.
This narrative about redirecting resources away from genocide and
towards “community” can be found in endless settler-left slogans such as
“build more schools, not bombs!” or “money for jobs and education, not
for war and occupation!” All such ideas revolve around the mythos of the
Amerikan “community”: a fictitious multi-national concept in which,
abstracted from the violence at the base of the Amerikan colony and the
national conflicts therein, we can imagine harmonious and communal ways
of life involving sharing our resources. This imagination goes back to
the root of settler consciousness in Occupied Turtle Island which
imagines a “Thanksgiving” where the colonists shared food with the First
Nations rather than poisoning, raping and murdering them by the
millions.
An almost identical narrative is wielded by referencing the “tax
dollars” spent on Palestine-solidarity campaigns’ targets, begging
Amerikans to rise up against a supposed misuse of money which is
otherwise rightfully owed to them. This relies on the same conceptual
basis as a “community.” If we believe this narrative then absent
specific policy mistakes (such as funding Israel) there would exist the
basis for peaceful redistribution of the spoils of genocide and
imperialism, and this would be a righteous redistribution. At the base
of these common yet mistaken ideas are 1) a genuine impulse towards
fascism by U.$. citizens who wish to become even more wealthy compared
to the Third World, and 2) ignorance regarding the source of global
wealth disparity to begin with.
We cannot resolve #1, the fascist impulse among a majority here,
without overturning imperialism and settler-colonialism entirely. To
address #2 however, we can study how “communities” in Occupied Turtle
Island are literally built and sustained off of genocide, slavery and
imperialism, especially regarding the “average jo.” There are two main
groups in the United $tates: the settlers and the oppressed nations.
Euro-Amerikan settlers have been a consistently reactionary group for
the past five centuries as their life here is founded on slavery and
land theft.(4) They are the numeric majority of the U.$. population and
have consistently subjected the First Nations, New Afrika and the
Chican@ nation with oppressive, genocidal campaigns.(5)
These oppressed nations on the other hand vacillate between
progressive and regressive tendencies depending on proximity to the
spoils of imperialism. Independence movements among oppressed nations
represent a progressive impulse wishing to sever connections with U.$.
imperialism, whereas participation in DEI (Diversity, Equity &
Inclusion) initiatives, reforming political parties and redistributing
wealth to the oppressed nations represent an integrationist trend which
serves to either enlarge the (petty-)bourgeoisie of these nations at the
expense of their oppressed masses or incorporate swaths of the nation
into the capitalist-imperialist world system.(6) Overall there are
substantial parts of oppressed nations here who still face genocide
while other portions steadily receive a bit more of the imperial
pie.
To the extent that anyone here enjoys it, the First World lifestyle
includes housing, food, medicine, transportation and extensive
leisure-time bought from the blood of indigenous peoples and
manipulation of global labor prices which under-pay workers in the Third
World and deprives them of basic necessities.(7) An over-accumulation of
profits in the United $tates has led to excess money supply and higher
domestic wages: the surplus available to create a complacent consumer
base beyond the settlers alone.(8) This is why wages here are
approximately 10x normal wages in Palestine. Thus while some U.$.
workers suffer under national oppression, they are almost all economic
oppressors of the Third World.(9)
So if we convince the majority here that they are actually
impoverished through imperialism, or would be enriched through its end,
we are misrepresenting the facts and tarnishing the cause of Palestinian
liberation. When imperialism inevitably falls, internationalist forces
in the imperial core will probably be encircled by fascism: citizens
here attempting to cling to lifestyles and social roles which can no
longer exist, led by whichever elements of the bourgeoisie can rally
them around new extractive outlets to replace old imperialism. The
faster we can pull away from self-interested economic thinking here, the
faster we will eventually construct socialism. The more here who search
for their own best interest through the fall of imperialism, the longer
such a task will take.
United front work in the imperial core on behalf of the global
proletariat will involve grappling deeply with the labor aristocracy and
the settler nation. We must investigate this majority’s interests as
they unfold in street protests, unions, universities and even prisons.
We shouldn’t reject them wholesale: we should condemn their economic
gluttony while simultaneously uniting those who will commit to fighting
on the behalf of the international proletariat. We must educate each and
every Amerikan who will listen about how their wealth comes from
genocide and how their lives will change when imperialism finally
falls.
Having rejected the fantasy of an abstract, multi-national Amerikan
“community,” we could instead support the many progressive causes
belonging to the oppressed nations here who have suffered under genocide
like Palestine. But such campaigns must be specific in their slogans and
selection of organizing base, as well as how to relate to those with
varying proximity to imperialism. Connecting progressive campaigns such
as those against police brutality, which predominantly affects oppressed
nations, to Palestinian sovereignty is a righteous cause. Trying to
connect Palestine to the reactionary dissatisfaction of everyday
Amerikan workers, especially settlers, is a recipe for fascism and
genocide.
Notes: 1. A
Million Tiny Fleas “The Anti-War Movement that Wasn’t” Substack, Jun 13
2023. 2. Cope, Zak “Divided World Divided Class” Kersplebedeb
2012, pg. 9. 3. The
Dawnland Group, “A Polemic against Settler Maoism”, MIM (Prisons)
website, June 2024. 4. Sakai, J. “Settlers: The mythology of the
White proletariat from mayflower to modern.”(2014). Kersplebedeb. 5.
Maoist
Internationalist Ministry of Prisons, “Proletarian Feminist
Revolutionary Nationalism” June 2017, pgs 96 – 108. 6. Labor
unions from oppressed nations integrating with settler and imperialist
labor unions is an important historic evidence of this trend. See:
Sakai, J. “Settlers: The mythology of the White proletariat from
mayflower to modern.”(2014). Kersplebedeb, pgs 152 – 174. 7. Jason
Hickel, Christian Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland, Intan Suwandi,
“Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global
South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015,” Global Environmental Change,
Volume 73, 2022. 8. Cope, Zak “Divided World Divided Class”
Kersplebedeb 2012, pg 200. 9. Undocumented migrants, prisoners,
homeless people, and the chronically unemployed lumpenproletariat are
generally not economic oppressors.
I am a prisoner of the Cañon City Complex, a “campus” with seven
prisons holding up to 10,000 victims of Colorado’s giant injustice
system. A few weeks ago I went out for a day trip to a doctor in the
town next to the complex, Cañon City. Much of the town is new,
businesses like motels, fast food joints, etc. line the main drag.
When sitting in the doctor’s office I asked the prison guard who was
there, “who or what financially supports all the people and businesses
in this town?” He replied, “The Cañon City Complex”. Yup, a whole town
that survives (mostly) because of mass imprisonment. Shut down the
prisons and the town would quickly become a ghost town.
We think about all the people that suck at the teat of The System,
from cops to lawyers, to all jail/prison personnel, to parole officers.
But few consider all the people/businesses that have a symbiotic
relationship with the teat suckers. Providers of all the goods and
services that they use from food, to clothing, to auto repair. A great
mass of people around the United $tates who will always cry “law and
order,” and who will oppose any reform efforts to reduce the number of
people arrested every year (10 million plus per Law Prof. Dan Canon),
the number of people imprisoned, or the length of the sentences.
My thesis is: If you are an activist/reformer who wants to change The
System, then you need to know exactly what you are up against. You
cannot have any real success unless you do.
MIM(Prisons) adds: We agree with that thesis. And this
comrade’s report aligns with our past research on the U.$.
prison economy and what is driving it. It has become chic to talk
about the “Prison Industrial Complex” as if there are a bunch of big
corporations whose profits are driving mass incarceration in this
country, like the ones that drive military production and war
(militarism). As this comrade describes, the prison system is more like
the New Deal. But instead of funding jobs to build roads to improve
transport for commerce, they are funding jobs to build prisons for
population control. In this way a goal of the state is accomplished,
while shuffling superprofits from the Third World to the Amerikans in
these prison towns doing unproductive labor whether as prison guards,
salespeople, cashiers, or insurance agents.
i want to begin with a sort of disclaimer or qualifier, due to the
fact that many speak on the realities of the lumpen, particularly the
street gang elements, who’re not cut from that cloth, if you will.
Although i am now a committed New Afrikan Freedom Fighter, i was
initiated into what is now the Forum Park Crips, in Houston, Texas, when
i was in my early teens. My life in the streets was one of tribal
animosities and strife, territorial beefs, and a survivalist level of
hustling and scheming. i did everything one does in the street life from
selling narcotics, to thievery, burglary, armed robberies, pimping, and
of course ‘sliding’, as they say nowadays.
As a result of this lifestyle and my social ignorance, and lack of
firm identity, purpose and direction, by age nineteen i found myself
wanted for capital murder, and by twenty-one sentenced to life without
parole for said murder, while holding strong to the key principle one
was taught in the lumpen sub-culture, ‘No Snitching’!
Prior and during my prison stint i operated as a makeshift hystorian,
and due to my persynal background i’ve paid much attention to the
historical development of the lumpen in North amerikkka in general, New
Afrika in particular, and the lumpen-organizational development
specifically. This along with my adherence to historical dialectical
materialist philosophy, i believe, qualify me to speak with a certain
level of knowledge, wisdom and understanding on the subject.
The Foundation
At the moment in time of the founding of the original Crips, one of
its co-founders, Tookie Williams(Ajami Kiamke Kamara) states plainly,
“The crips mythology has many romanticized, bogus accounts.” i believe
We in revolutionary movements take these and other similar ones too
literally and therefore misrepresent the origins and hystorical
functions of the Crips and others within the class and national
liberation struggles. In this realm we often promote an idealized,
non-materialist perspective.
Mr. Kamara(Williams) continues,
“Another version[ of Crip mythology] incorrectly documents the Crips
as an offshoot of the Black Panther Party (BPP). No Panther Party member
has ever mentioned the Crips(or Cribs) as being a spin-off of the
Panthers. It is also fiction that the Crips functioned under the acronym
C.R.I.P, for Community Resources Inner-City Project or Community
Revolutionary Inner City Project.(words like ‘revolutionary agenda’ were
alien to our thuggish, uninformed teenage consciousness.) We did not
unite to protect the Community; our motive was to protect ourselves and
our families.”
i’ve begun this ‘Foundational’ part of this piece within these words
from the late Mr. Kamara, because We too often, and too easily
romanticize the beginnings of the urban amerikkkan street organizations.
Now that i’ve clarified that the Crips weren’t exactly founded with a
revolutionary or progressive intent it makes it clearer why the Crips
have largely stagnated in their operations for so long now.
The late Malcolm X once said that ‘prison is the poor man’s
university’, and proving his maxim true, it was many of the first
generation of Crips who populated the prisons in California, being
influenced by the politicized culture in the prison established by those
who came before them, who began an effort(s) to improve the imagery, and
provide meaning to what Mr. Kamara himself even called, ‘a causeless
cause’.
When the imprisoned Crips began to become more culturally aware in
the 80’s and onward they sought to stir the crip force in another
direction by establishing a constitution, which was largely influenced
by the BGF constitution, they functioned under acronyms like C.R.I.P,
for Community Revolution In Progress, and other similar ones, brothers
began becoming Afro-centric and instituted speaking ki-swahili. Also,
many around those times became radical and politicized. Some formed orgs
like the Black Riders Liberation Party, a new generation Black Panther
Party that was formed in the 90’s by former Crips and Bloods. Others
formed more groups like the C.C.O.(Consolidated Crips Organization)
which was to be de-tribalized, more centralized and politicized version
of the Crips street gang. Many of these brothers had intentions of
changing the various communities and ‘Crip turfs’ they represented upon
their release from prison. More often than not their efforts were not
effective enough to curtail or re-focus the self-destructive culture
that had by then turned southern California upside down.
Simultaneously the Crips and other similar groups were spreading
throughout the north amerikkkan continent, what wasn’t spreading however
was the more refined and socially aware sectors or versions of the Crips
entity. So instead of ’hoods across amerikkka emulating a Conscious
Crip, they were emulating cats who were Crip Crazy, and this
subsequently intensified elements of self-destruction among the New
Afrikan nation in amerikkka.
Building On The Foundation
As the 21st century came and settled in, the spread of the Crips to
every corner of the kkkountry resulted in different locales placing
their own unique cultural traits and adding on to the hystory of the
original formation Mr. Kamara and Raymond Washington founded along with
Mac Thomas. Therefore, many people, and groups Built of the
Foundation.
i’ll preface the following by stating that lumpen organizations have
repeatedly showcased the capacity to turn away from basic parasitic
criminality. However, they’ve done this in two similar but unique ways.
One way is progressive in terms of its break from basic criminality, yet
it is reactionary in terms of its benefit to the revolution. The other
way is progressive in that it provides the break from the criminal
mentality, and is also revolutionary in that it seeks to join the
revolutionary forces in collective war against the state and its enemy
institutions.
We’ve seen examples of the first way numerous of times. One which may
be familiar to some is the 1966 arranged truce between the then
Blackstone rangers and the East Side Disciples, which was instigated by
the promise of the $930,000 in grant money from the federal government
through the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). The grant was based on
a deal that the two street organizations would cease their beef and come
together to prevent uprisings, which had become common throughout
heavily populated New Afrikan enclaves throughout the kkkountry.
Local politicians in the Chicago Democratic Party and the Southern
Democrats in Congress did not approve of these particular elements being
provided with Grant money from the government, and the grant was
cancelled a year later(1967). In 1968 the Chicago BPP was founded and
these same lumpen orgs were enlisted or attempted to be enlisted by the
federal government to prevent the rise in influence of the BPP and its
revolutionary line. The Rangers and the Conservative Vice Lords opted
for the former way, and were showered with grant money from the
bourgeoisie(Clement Stone of Combined Insurance of America; Sears; First
National Bank of Chicago, among others). These lumpen moved toward Black
Capitalism, and filled the vacuum in what was then a new non-profit
sector instituted to remove the teeth from the revolution and the
revolutionary potential of the lumpen particularly.
On the other hand, the East Side Disciples changed their name to the
Black Disciples (identifying as Black instead of negro was a culturally
progressive action at the time) and formed an alliance with the Chicago
BPP.
So as this hystorical account illustrates, the lumpen are a
vacillating class. We can flow whichever way the wind blows, but Our
life experience under monopoly capitalism and imperialism, suggested
that absent a form of ‘class-suicide’, We will do like the Rangers and
take the capitalist road, which will have us cozied up with the
bourgeoisie, making love with our enemies and murdering our friends.
Within the Forum Park Crip experience there has been an evolution and
a certain level of class struggle, and ideological struggle (which is
one in the same thing). To quote Malcolm X, again, ‘Prisons are the poor
man’s university’. One member of the Forum Park Crips (FPC) spent time
incarcerated and chose to apply himself.
He learned somethings from the cats like myself who have been
politicized while in captivity and he began to develop a New Vision for
our street tribe. Upon release, he began to institute the New Vision.
See everyone and every entity has a basic Identity, Purpose and
Direction, and as evolution takes place it takes place within the nature
of these three elements of the entity in question. So upon release the
first step was to apply a New Vision to what the Identity of a FPC
was/is.
Like the brothers in California decades ago with their
C.R.I.P.(Community Revolution In Progress), the homie strove to fine
tune the image, by establishing Forever Protecting the Community(FPC) as
an official community organization dedicated to mentoring youth,
minimizing gang violence, and empowering the community.
Because of the numerous influences, and illegitimate capitalism being
foremost among them, FPC in its beginning stages turned down a similar
road as Jeff Fort’s Rangers in 1960’s Chicago. FPC received grants from
the city and used them along with other similar formations to fund a
purchasing of acreage to start community gardens, promoting food
sovereignty, a memorial tribute to victims of police and gun violence.
Prior to the grants FPC provided school supplies and thousands of
backpacks, sponsored summer kids’ festivals, and mentoring school
children by doing speaking engagements at local schools.
As i’ve pointed out, these efforts are progressive in the sense
they’re a long way from the parasitic criminality the homies had been
involved with prior. However, it can be reactionary in the sense that
absent any sense of revolutionary orientation, this amounts to nothing
more than mere community service, and never did at the root of the
systematic problems that cause the surface level expression of the
oppressive social contract.
After discussing this somewhat with some of the guys plans have come
to fruition to establish a campaign that attacks a particular vestige of
genocidal culture in the Forum Park area. This being the out of control
open-air sex trafficking that de-values our community and makes it
uncomfortable and unsafe for elements in Our community. The campaign
will create a class struggle for unity both within the community and the
organization, and will make the bond between the org and the people.
Moreso, it will begin to establish what will hopefully become a distinct
line of demarcation between the local government, and the rest of the
non-profit sector, who’ve become entranced with utilizing the plights of
the people as a stepping stool to gain economic upliftment. As FPC and
other similar formations move out of that mode of operations, and begin
to call others out on it and for their deceitful service to the people,
it will create unity within classes apart of the local class
struggle.
In closing, i’ve found the observation of comrade Jalil Abdul
Muntaqim to be true,
“Beneath the Black working class are the subculture
lumpen-proletariat, the unskilled and menial laborers whose primary
means of subsistence is based on hustling(stealing, selling drugs,
prostitution etc), marginal employment, and welfare. For the most part
the socioeconomic provision within the subculture are maintained by the
‘illegitimate capitalist’ activity of the lumpen-proletariat. In
accordance with their aspirations to fulfill the social values of the
bourgeoisie, they employ business acumen in criminal activity for
subsistence and profit. As they seek material wealth and social status
of the bourgeoisie within the confines of the subculture, they are in
many ways politically reactionary, unconcerned with anything other than
personal survival and individual gain. It is only when the
lumpen-proletariat are educated and become politically aware of their
socioeconomic condition, that the possibility exists for them to become
staunch supporters of the revolution, recognizing their dire standard of
living is based wholly on the system of oppression they are desperately
trying to emulate…”
As has been routinely stated, the revolutionary forces must
ingratiate themselves within the activities of the lumpen organization.
Specifically once they’ve already reached a certain level of collective
social awareness and activity. And then, influence the development of
their social awareness and activity by providing political education, by
conceptualizing programs that are pertinent to the particular lumpen
community one is seeking to organize. The lumpen is a vacillating class,
that can and often does see-saw between revolutionary and reactionary
activities. There are some socially aware and nationalistic elements,
particularly among the oppressed nations of north amerikka, who can be
coached towards full support of the revolution, the choice between
serving the people heart and soul, and the reactionary road are
ultimately up to the lumpen themselves. i’ll leave with a word from
Comrade George:
“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of the
situation, understand that fascism is already here. That people are
already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live
poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done,
discover your humanity and your life in revolution. Pass on the torch,
join us, give up your life for the people.” - George L. Jackson
SOURCES: 1. Blue Rage Black Redemption, Stanley Tookie
Williams 2. Ibid. 3. Vita Wa Watu #11, Spears & Shield
Publications 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. We Are Our Own Liberators,
Jalil Abdul Muntaqim, ‘National Strategy of FROLINAN’ 7. Blood In My
Eye, George L. Jackson
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 us. 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 it 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.
On 23 December 2023 Reuters reported Iranian Revolutionary Guards
stating the Red Sea will be closed if the United $tates and its allies
continue to commit “crimes” in Gaza. The next day, a drone struck a
commercial tanker owned by an I$raeli billionaire in the Gulf of Oman.
The U.$. and I$rael claim it was Iran who launched the drone, but Iran
denies it.
While involvement of Iran in the emerging regional war remains
cryptic, the Ansar Allah party has been very open about drone attacks
launched by the Yemeni Armed Forces on ships in the Red Sea. They have
said that until the siege of Gaza ends, shipping by I$raeli companies
through the Red Sea is not gonna happen. When U.$. Secretary of State
Antony Blinken called for them to stop their attacks, they responded
brazenly with “No.”
Secretary of State Blinken has been behind imperialist bombings in
Yemen for many years, as we discussed in a 2015 article.(1) It is no
wonder that the Ansar Allah slogan is “Allah is great, death to the
United States, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for
Islam.”(2)
Yemen has been at war with the Amerikans and their Saudi partners for
decades now, and despite being one of the poorest countries in the
world, have maintained their sovereignty against those imperialist
attacks.
The Yemeni Armed Forces response to the bombing of Gaza started with
warnings against any ships entering the Red Sea associated with I$rael,
boarding ships and telling them to turn around. Then on 19 November they
took over the ship Galaxy Leader with helicopters dropping off armed
troops and boats flanking the tanker. They flew the Palestinian flag on
the ship and posted videos online.
In addition, the Yemeni Armed Forces has shot missiles and flown
drones into southern I$rael. They even knocked a $40 million U.$. drone
out of the air.(3)
In Yemen, hundreds of thousands marched in opposition to the recent
bombings of Gaza by I$rael. The people of Yemen have long stood in
strong solidarity with Palestine liberation.
The Red Sea, going through the Suez Canal, is one of the three most
critical shipping routes in the world, with bulk goods and containers
going to the Mediterranean. The Red Sea is full of war ships from all
over the world, Djibouti being the home of many imperialist naval bases.
As much as 30% of global shipping containers can be in this area at any
time.(3)
Many major shipping companies have stopped shipping through the Suez
Canal in recent weeks. This forces them to go around Africa, delaying
ships weeks to a month, greatly increasing cost.
In response to all this, the Amerikans recently announced a U.$.
naval task force to combat Ansar Allah named “Operation Prosperity
Guardian”. Can’t let interventions against genocide get in the way of
profit flows the the United $tates. No states on the Red Sea have signed
on and the only Arab state to sign on, Bahrain, has no navy of its own
but hosts U.$. military bases. Meanwhile, close military allies such as
Jordan and Saudi Arabia are not willing to sign on. It is not just in
Yemen that the people are outraged about what is happening in Gaza. No
Arab state, no matter how brutal and reactionary, is willing to stand
with the U.$./I$raeli camp in this genocide.
Even Egypt, whose whole economy is threatened by a halt of shipping
through the Suez Canal, cannot assist the U.$. effort against Yemen.
They figure they can survive economic collapse better than the response
of their people to such betrayal of Yemen and Palestine.(4)
Saudi Arabia is currently involved in the peace process in Yemen,
bringing internal peace and unity to Yemen, following Ansar Allah’s
victory against U.$./Saudi warfare. Standing up for Palestine militarily
strengthens Yemen’s position in the peace negotiations.(4)
I$rael is taking a huge economic hit from the war overall. The
I$raeli airport is mostly closed, cutting off important tourist money.
The Palestinian proletariat from the West Bank and Gaza are no longer
coming in to do work, and tens of thousands of Thai proletarians have
left kibbutz farms where they did much of the agricultural work for the
country. Meanwhile, half a million I$raelis evacuated the south and the
government is paying to house them in hotels. Unemployment in I$rael has
tripled in the last month, and businesses have lost half of their
revenues.(3) Ansar Allah is contributing to this increasing economic
pressure on I$rael demonstrating what real internationalism looks like
in the face of a genocide against an oppressed nation.
“This anti-Semitic agitation, frequently masking under radical
slogans, represents an enormous danger both to the Jewish people and to
the revolutionary movement in the country, for it threatens to drown in
fraternal blood the whole cause of freeing the people and to cover the
revolutionary popular movement with indelible shame.”
To this day we still have problems in the international communist
movement (ICM) of groups focusing on Israel, rather than the imperialist
powers. This reference to Jews by Ansar Allah’s slogan, similarly risks
misidentifying the enemy, though correctly putting U.$. imperialism
first.
Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” is an overnight viral hit, accumulating millions of listens and ranking as the most streamed song on iTunes in Amerika and right now 28 million views on Youtube plus over a million likes. With that catchy southern twang, and a message speaking to workers directly, it is clearly resonating with a lot of people – but what does this mean?
Let’s look first at the lyrics to get a sense of what this song is all about. There’s two main parts of the song that i think really get to the root of what Anthony’s trying to convey. Ey points out:
“Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat And the obese milkin’ welfare Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground ‘Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down.”
So there’s two matters here: one is the issue of fat people milking welfare, and the other is the plight of the Amerikan workers. Welfare is no doubt a gift of imperialist parasitism paid with super-profits, and MIM pointed out a long time ago how Amerikan minds and bodies are rotting on imperialist parasitism, highlighting the contrast between affluent imperialist countries and the poor exploited countries.
MIM said basically that overcoming imperialism is the only way to reshape food production and consumption, to address the disparity in obesity rates with an equitable distribution of resources to effectively tackle the issue. But so long as imperialism remains, so does parasitism which always fattens up the unproductive of the empire and feeds on the hard working poor of the world. So now here’s the other issue, that question of the plight of the Amerikan workers. Factually, the U.$. government safeguards its labor aristocracy (most of whom are unproductive workers in the service industry) through a multifaceted approach, utilizing OSHA guidelines, mandating minimum wage laws, regulating maximum working hours, and ensuring collective bargaining rights. This is all ensured with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Department of Labor (DOL), and so on.
In terms of safety, the U.$ is among the safer of countries for workers as it pertains to workplace fatality – still far from perfect. Our most dangerous industry is agriculture, forestry, and fishing with a fatal injury rate at 20 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers. Migrants from south of the U.$./Mexico border make up around 75% of U.$. farm workers so it is no surprise that the most dangerous industry affects Amerikans the least.
But back to the song. The refrain goes:
“These rich men north of Richmond Lord knows they all just wanna have total control Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do ’Cause your dollar ain’t shit and it’s taxed to no end ’Cause of rich men north of Richmond.”
These are your typical Amerikan’s grievances with the system: the government is too big, and the feds won’t keep their greedy hands off your money. Considering Biden’s new plan for 87,000 new IRS agents and his incessant drive to intervene in the affairs of crypto currency companies and his promotion of a new IRS rule to require anyone who earned over $600 on payment apps (like Paypal, Venmo, etc.) to file a 1099-K form to ensure taxation is being paid by lower classes – yeah, maybe this resentment is understandable. But really, Amerika is ranked 32nd out of 38 OECD countries in terms of the tax-to-GDP ratio.(1) Belgium (42.8%), Germany (39.9%), Denmark (38.9%), etc. pay higher taxes, and also receive better social programs. Even the tax rate in Hungary (35%) is higher than in the United $tates (16.4%), which is just above i$rael (15.5%). Since the top 25% of earners pay 89% of all income taxes, and since virtually all Amerikans make more than 90% of the rest of the world in income, is the dollar really worth shit, are Amerikans really taxed to no end, as Anthony claims? [editor note: Not to mention U.$. dollar values being propped up by interest rate hikes that are decimating the value of currencies in exploited countries that must pay debts in U$D.]
No, so what are Amerikans complaining about? Taxes in the U.$. contribute to funding programs such as education, healthcare, social security, unemployment benefits, housing assistance, food assistance, veterans’ services, infrastructure projects, environmental protection, and public transportation; Amerikans have access to clean water, electricity, smartphones, cars, internet connectivity, modern healthcare, education, reliable infrastructure, well-stocked supermarkets, and recreational facilities, which are often unavailable to many in the third world.
So again, what are Amerikans complaining about? Typical Amerikkkan tears over the incompetence of their imperialist leaders who are unable to share the super-profits from the neo-colonies effectively. This is why we rely on science, not frog-in-the-well subjectivism, to inform us about the world.
Frustration
In recent years the labor aristocracy has been shook. The 2016 and 2020 elections show deep-going upset in different segments of the population, which is leading to strange ideological currents among the youth (including a return to religious dogma on the one end and a clinging to nihilism on the other). Some people have just given up on society, so a kind of Kaczynskian primitivism is also making a come-back.
We’re seeing some class problems blow up too, with unions taking more action across the board (with the rail workers, the baristas, and now the script writers and actors in recent months). The crypto-Trotskyite “left” is capitalizing on these grievances to pick up speed and organize, especially among students and younger workers who want a bigger piece of the Amerikan-bloodsuckin’ pie.
Inflation has driven up prices and this month it was revealed how Amerikans have racked up more than $1 trillion of credit card debt.(2) While high credit card debt in general is an indicator of high access to consumption, the recent increases seem to be linked to higher prices. The student debt crisis is also haunting the Amerikan consumption rate, because Amerikans own $1.77 trillion in federal and private student loan debt as of the second quarter of 2023. That’s serious, and students have gotten to the point of just saying “hell no, we ain’t paying that.”
The government, or at least some forces in it, are responsive to that, with the Biden regime talking about “student loan forgiveness.” But it hasn’t been successful. The first time, the Supreme Court ruled that the Secretary of Education did not have the power to waive student loans under the HEROES Act. So Biden is now trying the Higher Education Act of 1965 to justify it, and ey just recently was able to perform an IDR Account Adjustment for 800,000 borrowers. This still doesn’t make the youth all that happy, and a large percentage of the older generations opposed the attempt at debt forgiveness.
Aside from class issues, there’s still heat picking up with the abortion issue and the question of censorship, and other things regarding your typical sex and drug issues. There’s a clear polarization between the youth and the old when it comes to how they approach this and see the world, the former seemingly liberal and the latter seemingly conservative. Generational disputes are all too common a sight now, each generation blaming the other for all the problems we face in the world today.
There is clearly a LOT of frustration, a LOT of unease and anger too – but is that really enough for a revolution? We will have to see the historical forces that the youth (especially the oppressor nation youth movement in the 1960s) and how to discipline this force for non-adventurist and scientific forms of resistance than individualist hedonism.
Proletarianization?
The proletariat’s more than the working-class, it’s defined by a more precise relationship to the ownership of the means of production, consumption, and relations to other classes. It’s the class that is not only dispossessed (without private property), it’s the class with nothing to lose but its chains. Do Amerikans now got nothing to lose but their chains?
Let us look at it from the standpoint of material comfort. Homes built in the last 6 years are 74% larger than those built in the 1910s, an increase of a little over 1,000 square feet – the average new home in the United $tates now spreads over 2,430 square feet.(3) The Biden regime is claiming that the bourgeoisie added 236,000 jobs in March(4) and a solid 187,000 jobs in July(5), and that the unemployment rate has fallen to just 3.5%, matching the lowest level in half a century. They’re claiming also that wages are rising faster than inflation. These claims would indicate that the situation for Amerikans isn’t really all that bad.
In 2019, MIM(Prisons) explained in “Economic Update: Amerikkkans Prospering in 2019” that amerikans are prospering with a stable economy and low unemployment, increased average wages and leisure time, more homeownership and accumulated wealth, etc., all kinds of indications of economic prosperity. There were some issues in 2020-2021 because of the pandemic and surely an economic crisis of big proportions is bound to crop up, but right now the tides seem to have stemmed – at least temporarily.
There is really no sign of proletarianization on the horizon. Maybe it will happen soon, but Comrade Mao said “Marxists are not fortune-tellers.”(6) To speak of lumpenization is perhaps more accurate than predicting proletarianization, i think both are possibilities with the decline of Amerikan capitalism.
While the contradictions described in MIM(Prisons)’s article on the expected recession in 2023 have not been resolved, the crisis has still not hit here in the heart of empire. The self-destructive nature of capitalism-imperialism will lead to wars and other man-made tragedies where these parasitic economic privileges we have will eventually end. Some examples of “fortune-telling” by Mao would be what time, date, and year a recession starts or an imperialist-war breaks out. Maoists do not concern ourselves with this type of prophecy – it is actually the labor aristocrat and petty-bourgeoisie movements of fascism that loves conspiracies and finding prophecies (such as the fascist nonsense promoted in the Elders of the Protocols of Zion and the reactionary QAnon Movement that seems to love Anthony’s song).
Right/Left Divide
In Amerika, the left of capital and the right of capital divide themselves on the issues of culture war but functionally have the same vested political interests in maintaining the status quo of capitalism-imperialism. Occasionally some of these people on the left wing of parasitism present themselves as radicals, anarchists, even sometimes Maoists, but the truth of it is that these are not communists.
The digital landscape’s been churning out a lot of these personalities in recent years. MIM(Prisons) has commented on some of these trends in Some Discussions on Bad Ideas (ULK 79), with attention to how
“communist groups are far outshadowed online by memes, twitch streamers, tik tok spheres, instagram pages, internet forums, and the likes when it comes to converting kids to communism than communist organization internet presence. This has given rise to the problem of communism becoming more akin to a sub-culture talked about on social media sites like twitter and reddit than a political movement. Different political stances from Maoism, Trotskyism, all the way to Stirnerite Anarchism cease to become guides to action, but a thing to put on your bio. Various people’s wars and nations at war become more akin to fandoms for TV shows to obsess and argue over rather than a movement to popularize and create awareness for. Political line ceases to become a belief and action that one takes, but a take one has so they can get on the algorithm. Line struggle turn into flame wars with no purpose of uniting with others, but exist only to express one’s individual self for the cathartic feeling of having the correct line.”
One of these recent digital trends has been known as “MAGA Communism,” with notable support from the likes of people named Haz Al-Din and Jackson Hinkle. This camp has positioned itself against the left and the right, opposing liberalism but also conservatism, taking bits from both sides. [MIM(Prisons) previously referred to Haz in the intro to our review of Pao-Yu Ching’s *From Victory to Defeat for eir meaningless definition of socialism, saying that every country in the last 100 years has been socialist.]
When it comes to songs like this one, it is seen as a message of class struggle by this camp. Haz claims “this song about class struggle by @aintgottadollar, a working class Virginian has gone viral overnight with millions of views from ordinary Americans. The masses are far ahead of the current right wing and leftist grifter ideologists who benefit from dividing the people!”(7)
Similar sentiment from a like-minded camp, calling itself “Patriotic Socialism,” is echoing much the same; you will find this view all over social media, especially the cesspool of Twitter where these ideological currents permeate. Opportunistically, they’re all invoking class struggle.
Well yes, the song is about class struggle but what kind of class struggle? Comrade Mao pointed out “this question of `for whom?’ is fundamental; it is a question of principle.”(8) i don’t see any real concern for the international proletariat in this song, i don’t see any mention of how this dying empire treats the rest of the world with diseases, bombs, sanctions, subversion, and other ways to bring death and destruction to fatten up the Amerikan ticks. So who does this song serve?
Comrade Mao said “all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines.” That’s why when analyzing literature and art, ey said, “the first problem is: literature and art for whom?”(9) This song is serving the interests of the labor aristocracy, albeit a disaffected branch of the labor aristocracy that has elements of both the right and left-wing of white nationalism.
Anthony eyself has said that “both sides serve the same master – and that master is not someone of any good to the people of this country.” This is conveniently being ignored by the MAGA right, who have taken Anthony as their savior and prophet. For example, here is what the right is saying:
“Rich Men North of Richmond is a key example of the populist-nationalist vs establishment paradigm. The anti-establishment message is gaining traction right now, and explains the dynamic we see in the GOP primary where career politicians are struggling against outsiders.” – Jack Posobiec (10)
“You might notice a theme there… [speaking of both Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” & Jason Aldean’s “Try that in a Small Town”] People are starved for music that speaks to them about today’s problems.” – Rogan O’Handley (11)
“Oliver Anthony is a star […] inside of the hearts of the people […] millions of us, with whom he has touched with his music, as somebody who is just desperately searching for a better world in a place that has been strip mined by our elites, and we are angry about it.” – Benny Johnson (12)
Ben Shapiro also praised the song, calling it “the cry of a lot of people in the United States” who feel “there are too many people who have their hand in their pocket, particularly elites in the federal government.”(13) So why ain’t the mainstream left vibing with it? Well a main reason is the song’s attack on the fat people (which they’re calling “fatphobic”) and Anthony’s denunciations of the “welfare state,” but i also think a contributing role is the general anti-southern chauvinism that is characteristic of the liberal-subjectivists in our country. Anthony is from the rural Appalachians, specifically North Carolina.
MIM(Prisons) notes that “there are various groups of people in the United States who share the physical misery of these rural masses – American Indians, Chicano farm laborers, Black tenant farmers in the South, the dispossessed whites of Appalachia. But most of these groups are scattered and weak, living on the fringes of capitalist society, away from its vital centers.”(14)
While the urban petty bourgeoisie’s reaction to Oliver Anthony is partly based in a disdain for southerners, the question is, how do we transform the thinking of those with gripes against the system? How do we get them to drop their vested material interests in parasitism, militarism, and conservatism? That requires more investigation, more practice. To speak of Anthony as this enlightening Buddha of the century is not scientific, his thinking is still backwards and merely reflects some tussles between the labor aristocracy and the imperialist bourgeoisie, but it is not great enough a leap to really consider this some kind of revitalization of Joe Hill or Woody Gutherie.
I think the most important thing to grasp in light of this song is that imperialism is basically in crisis and there’s a lot of discontent at home, and this is fueling contradictions of all kinds. Comrade Mao made it extremely clear that “there is nothing that does not contain contradiction; without contradiction nothing would exist.”(16) The question we need to deal with is how to tackle and wrangle with these contradictions.
The key to contradictions and their resolution is practice. Comrade Mao conceived of it in this way: Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. Stepping up practice is a big leap along the way of figuring out problems and having our thinking correspond to really-existing laws that govern society. As fascism and social-fascism step up to the plate and imperialism crashes into deeper peril, advancing our work as Maoists is key to ensuring our survival and our ability to meet the challenges that come ahead.
The challenges ahead are gonna be difficult but we are taught not to fear hardships or sacrifices, not even death. Focusing on ideological unity, strengthening our organizational bond, digging deeper, and keeping at it, more answers will reveal themselves about the nature of what’s going on and what we need to do. More practice is what we need. That lofty criterion of practice is our compass to success and our life-blood.
With practice, we gain insight, we gain consciousness, we gain unity, and we gain struggle and pain too. It ain’t supposed to be easy. We are up against a big ass labor aristocracy serving a strong imperial empire and its representative drones in the White House. But they won’t win. That’s what strategic confidence is all about. This is all a paper tiger, and practice proves that empire ain’t all that.
So long as the proletariat of the Third World is revolutionizing, and the empire is dying, the situation is excellent in my eyes. Our day is coming, don’t let the grifters, tricksters and swindlers fool ‘ya.
For many months we’ve been hearing some grumblings from our readers about sky-rocketing commissary prices. Last issue we put out a call for more reports on this price inflation. But this inflation is not unique to prisons, and in recent weeks we’ve seen its impacts on the imperialists with a number of banks in the United $tates and Switzerland failing.
The cycles of boom and bust, which lead to instability, are inherent to capitalism and how it works. While the imperialists have adapted in many ways to keep things going, they can never solve these problems or prevent these cycles.
“since the prices of commissary has gone up due to inflation I think that all prisoners with jobs should be given pay rate raises to help with the new higher costs of living in the prison population. It is much harder to keep up with the financial strain. …I know that out in society whenever the cost of living goes up due to inflation so does our income and of course I am referring to low-income people – people on Social Security Income (SSI) or Social Security(SS) or struggling on Welfare. Well in prisons we don’t make anywhere near what is made on SSI or SS or even Welfare for that matter.”
"At the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis President Trump warned us against price gouging but that never stopped the jail system. The criminal injustice system put people in jail for stealing but then they turn around and steal from the same people they accuse of stealing. County jails are full of homeless people, drug addicts and indigent people who have limited means or no family or friend to help provide those means, yet the canteen prices for commissary are outrageous. These same products can be bought at the Dollar store.
"For example, items such as V05 shampoo, which you can purchase at the dollar store for $1.25, commissary price is $3.99. One ramen noodle can be purchased for $0.25 at the store, will cost you $1.19 in commissary. Also a 10 pack of SweetNLow costs $0.99. For generic denture glue it’s $7 in commissary compared to $1.25 at the Dollar store. The list goes on and on. Is that not price gouging?
“Prisoners are forced to accept it. They have no choice. They have to pay it or go without. Hygiene and medications they desperately need. My question to you – how do we change this and stop jails from stealing from prisoners?”
Price gouging or extortion is common in U.$. prisons where the state allows private companies to come in and prey on prisoners and their families with legally enforce monopoly pricing systems.
A comrade in New York responded to our call with some of the price increases seen there since July 2022.
item
July price
new price
syrup
$2.45
$2.75
cold cuts
$0.75
$0.85
chips
$1.02
$1.18
onions
$1.45
$1.85
graham crackers
$1.96
$2.33
Most price increases in New York seemed to be in the 10 to 20% range. As a member of the Incarcerated Individual Liaison Committee, this comrade wrote the Deputy Superintendent about the troubles they were having with getting items on the commissary list. They responded in September 2022,
“The commissary contract allows the vendor to bid items and the price is allowed to rise (or fall) based on the real world. They are not required to lose money. Our stocking situation reflects the real world supply chain issues and inflation.”
The comrade told us,
“the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision has raised the commissary buy limit from $75.00 to $90.00 to compensate for the inflation and changes to the package from home/vendor program that was implemented last year (2022).”
Unlike in the free world, not only do prisoners face limits on how much they can earn but also on how much they can spend.
Inflation is Real
Above, the NYSDOCS refers to the “real world” as being the cause of the rising prices in commissary. The fact of the matter is that inflation rates in the United $tates have been higher than we’ve seen in many decades for everyone. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) in December 2021 had increased 7% year-over-year, and in December 2022 it was 6.5%. That means over two years the inflation rate is around 15% for all consumer goods. In this context, the price increases in New York commissaries look pretty typical for the economy overall. That does not mean that this is inevitable, it is only inevitable in the type of economy we live in.
And it is only if we are slaves to the capitalist market forces that we must accept these price increases on necessities for some of the poorest people in this country. Even capitalist countries use subsidies to alter the market.
Socialist China had no inflation
The Communist Party of China seized state power in 1949 after over two decades of people’s war waged against the imperialists and their Chinese lackies among the comprador bourgeoisie and landlord classes. Immediately following liberation there were speculators
“still trying to manipulate prices and stirring up waves in the economy… who ignored the repeated warnings of the People’s Government, gold and silver prices kept soaring, pushing up all other prices. So on 10 June 1949 the Stock Exchange – that centre of crime located in downtown Shanghai – was ordered to close down and 238 leading speculators were arrested and indicted. The 1,800 gold and silver coin peddlers were released on the spot after being enjoined to lead a more honest life. At one stroke, the headquarters of speculation vanished forever from Shanghai.”(1)
Unfortunately that last statement proved untrue, as the Shanghai Stock Exchange was re-established on 26 November 1990, following over a decade of capitalist restoration in China.(2) This is why China has it’s own economic woes today. But for a quarter century, China had no inflation.
During the socialist period of 1949-1976, the Communist Party never resorted to bank-note issue as a solution for fiscal problems, relying on raising production and practicing economy instead.(3) This remained true through the Korean War and periods of famine in the 1950s.(4) During the Covid-19 lockdown period the capitalist economy suffered greatly because it cannot adapt to decreases in production. The solution in the imperialist countries was for central banks to print a lot of money and give it to the capitalists as well as their labor aristocracy, to keep consumption up and prevent economic collapse. The solution to the bank collapses in recent weeks has been similar, providing more liquidity from the U.$. Federal Reserve on loan to banks that can’t cover their balance sheets.
The communist approach in China was the opposite. Rather than putting as much money out into the world as needed, and encouraging banks to loan more than they have, the Communist Party forced banks to hold most of their currency, forced agencies to keep most of their money in the banks and prohibited securities, bonds, precious metal trade and foreign currency. Remember, mortgage-backed securities were at the center of the last recession in 2008. Today we are seeing a similar crisis in high-risk loans for automobiles in the United $tates that happened for home loans in 2008.
Bond prices are at the heart of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and others. Socialist China didn’t issue bonds, because they didn’t take on federal debt.
Prior to liberation, in 1935-37, the Chinese currency was pegged to the USD. As a result, when inflation spiked in the United $tates, that inflation was amplified in China. In ULK 79 we discussed the current inflation crisis in Ghana. Because Ghana does not control its currency and does not keep out foreign currency and speculators, their currency (the Cedi) is manipulated by the imperialists. This is true across the Third World, where inflation will continue to be felt much more harshly than it is for us here in the belly of the beast.
The other problem in countries like Ghana is the foreign debt. Inflation is playing a big role here, as the USD becomes more expensive compared to local currencies, larger and larger portions of the money supplies in exploited countries are going to pay the same interest rates on loans from the imperialists. Debt forgiveness in these countries needs to occur to protect the lives of millions threatened with starvation today.
According to the World Food Program, “An expected 345.2 million people [are] projected to be food insecure in 2023 – more than double the number in 2020.”(5) The recent increase in famine is mainly in the poorest, exploited countries, and triggered by a combination of inflation, war and climate change.
We know there is enough food in the world to feed everyone. The problem is capitalism cannot be efficient enough to distribute it to places where super-exploitation occurs. And super-exploitation is necessary to maintain profit rates. Without positive profit rates, capitalism grinds to a halt.
When socialist China had actual shortages in essentials, they would ration them instead of increasing prices and making the problem worse. Then they would focus on increasing production of those essentials (rather than decreasing production like the capitalists do when there’s no profits to be had).(6) Contrast this with prisoners (and everyone else) in the United $tates who are now paying higher prices for food and other essentials because the commissary is operated on the capitalist market. The anarchy of production under capitalism means we constantly have too much or too little of various goods as individuals decide what to produce based on their own profit interests. And this is particularly noticeable when the economy starts to slow down or shows volatility as it has been lately.
Socialist China focused on production to manage and drive the economy, whereas imperialist United $tates focuses on money supply to do so. In socialist China the banks were merely a tool to manage and allocate resources to manage production for the people’s needs.
Why Banks are failing
As mentioned above, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) had a big problem due to the value of its federal bonds dropping in value. They had bought the bonds when interest rates were much lower, so as the Fed continues to increase interest rates these old bonds drop in value. They cannot cash in the bonds until their term is due and they can only sell them at a loss. Some big players began pulling their money out of the bank, perhaps related to this knowledge. Soon SVB could not cover the deposits they owed people. The U.$. government has stepped in to cover it, and now the FDIC is covering infinite deposits if your bank fails, instead of the previous limit of $250,000. This is another sign of the willingness of the imperialists to throw newly printed cash at the problem.
One interesting point here is that federal bonds are a “safe” investment. SVB didn’t fail because of garbage mortgage-backed securities as happened in 2008. So the financial system is failing firms that play it safe this time around. In addition, according to the FDIC, SVB was not in the worst situation.(7) In other words, other banks in the United $tates have worse balance sheets than SVB and will fail if there is a run on their money. “The total unrealised losses sitting on the books of all banks is currently $620bn, or 2.7% of US GDP.”(7)
The biggest failure this year, at the time of this writing, was the 165 year-old bank Credit Suisse. Meanwhile the market is jittery around many large imperialist banks with stock prices seeing big dips and credit default swaps (CDS) spiking in price. CDSs going up means other institutions are not confident these banks can pay off their debts and are charging more to insure bonds from these banks. The differing interests of these major financial institutions are beginning to show on the markets as they bet against each other.
Conclusion
Prisoners are on some of the most fixed budgets of any population in this country. In order to get their basic needs related to nutrition, hygiene and outside contact, prisons need to increase pay rates and limits on how much money prisoners can spend and receive from the outside. In some states these reforms have already occurred, and this is in the interests of the commissary companies, which the prison systems want to keep satisfied.
The solution to the bigger economic contradictions playing out now is obviously replacing capitalism with socialism. The report from socialist China cited above succinctly explains why this is the case. Capitalism doesn’t just put profit over the need of people and life on this planet, capitalism actually requires profit to function. When profits dry up, as we’re seeing some evidence of right now, capitalism can’t produce what people need. Of course, we’re also seeing various forms of state intervention to ensure that this does not happen by providing more money and creating profitable situations using the central banks. But these contradictions continue to exist, and different interests are acting in anarchic ways, so that state intervention cannot always work as it does in a socialist economy.
“That is to instill a psychological sense of self-worth, without actually altering the material conditions that actually cause the lack of self-esteem in the first place, nor do they attempt to alter the conditions” - Power to New Afrika (1)
I agree with Comrade Triumphant. I would just like to add a little and ask a question. This quote – if I’m not mistaken – speaks to those Black bourgeoisie who led the masses to believe that pro-Black capitalism was progress. It is said that the achievements and rewards gained from jobs, hustles and labor wins the respect and dignity from their peers and society. That status in society is what the people seek and this is what instills that psychological sense of self-worth. But before they reached that status they had a lack of self-esteem because of their lack of material goods. They were comparing themselves to those that had and recognized that they themselves had not. So in comparison, they were less than because they had less than.
Once wealth and status is accomplished the conditions that created the “lack of” in the Black Nation remains, therefore continuing its destructive effect on the people of that nation. This destruction is both on the objective and subjective level: the people’s revolutionary spirit gets high-jacked by Black capitalism. Individualism gets promoted instead of unity because of the competition that comes along with it. We then see ourselves as enemies fighting over crumbs at the lower levels of this capitalist society. Now those that make it out of the poor communities ride high on their psychological sense of self-worth and disregard their communities. They get big-headed and become bourgeoisified. And the only time they reach back is either training the people to be entertainers, drug pushers, or funding politicians who favor reform – from which we all know are just tools of pacifying the people.
This is a major problem with trying to revolutionize the people. First because we must show that we can produce in a capitalist society. Nobody wants to hear from someone who has no money how to run their lives. So the revolutionary may start with intentions on gaining influence and persuading the masses to revolutionize, but if to do so they must participate in the same thing that extorts from the people – that’s a contradiction and a bit hypocritical. Not to mention it’s a slippery slope. That psychological sense of self-worth becomes a high, then the Black capitalist begins to chase that trying to stay relevant. And to do so – more money must be made, more material things must be bought, and more of our brothers/sisters/friends from our own nations and other oppressed nations of world imperialism will be exploited and manipulated as a result. So my question is how to do that without falling victim to embourgeoisfication: the desire to have, so once the proletariat has, how does he not become bourgeoisified?
Wiawimawo of MIM(Prisons) responds: The premise presented here by Melo X is that nobody will listen to someone without money, so we must make money to succeed at revolution. Ey goes on to assert that to succeed at making money traps us in a life of chasing money. I would challenge both of these premises.
The first premise is one that i’ve heard many times. I’ve even received feedback from the masses that i was not presenting myself in a way that garners respect. There are countless organizations that use the dress up approach to get respect in the hood. The Black Panthers even did this to an extent with their uniforms and black leather jackets. Many thought this looked cool. But they did not present themselves as having wealth, they were mostly kids, often with no job, no hustle, living in cramped conditions. They merely presented themselves as being organized, disciplined, powerful.
The point that Triumphant was making in that article is that we can present and assert power in ways that are not how capitalism teaches us to do so. And in fact we must assert power in these ways in order to actually meet our real needs, as Melo X recognizes.
The second premise, that chasing money is a trap has a lot of truth to it. It is often a necessary evil. But not because we need to be rich for the masses to follow us, but because we must fund our projects. We must demonstrate to the masses how to be effective. A strong mass-based movement should have diversified sources of resources coming from the masses themselves because they see its effectiveness. Our mass base in prisons has been growing in the form of financial support over the last few years, which we see as a success. Yet most of our funding comes from comrades working at jobs outside.
Having to work is about survival and basic functioning in our society. If you don’t have stable housing and basic needs met, it is hard to be consistent in organizing work. For most of us at this time, working is a necessary evil. And it will eat up a lot of our time and energy. As such it will affect our consciousness as well. But it is not so addictive that we will become slaves to the dollar. We should all strive to find ways to get the money we need for our own sustenance and the sustenance of the movement in a way that best allows us to serve the people. In a high-cost, highly monetized society this is a challenge that we must approach strategically.
If you are an individual just trying to do good for your people in this society, yes you will most likely become bourgeoisified as you succeed in this society. It is by putting politics in command, using Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as our guiding ideology, that can keep us from failing into that trap.
SunWukong of MIM(Prisons) adds: Another aspect of gaining respect from the masses is through mass line. We can learn from history on this aspect - namely the Black Panther Party’s (BPP) serve the people programs and the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) people’s war. Whenever the Chinese communists first entered a village and started setting up a base area, it surveyed the material needs and subjective wants of the local masses. Many of these problems included backward irrigation methods and agricultural practices that have been used in China for centuries, and because many of the Chinese communists came from an academic/intellectual backgrounds, they were able to gain knowledge of more “modern” and developed agricultural methods of the advanced imperialist countries. Once the mass line is set up, the peasants would even offer their sons and daughters to the People’s Liberation Army to fight for the revolutionary cause. Green fatigues and red stars didn’t have much cultural aesthetic clout in semi-feudal China, but it was the implementation of the mass line and building the proper relations with the masses that gained the CPC so much respect to where peasants were fine with their kids joining a guerrilla army.
Notes: (1) Triumphant, August 2022, Power to New Afrika, MIM Distributors.
On 26 December 2022, the Unified Maoist International Conference
(UMIC) announced the founding of the International Communist League
(ICL). The organizations involved see the need to build a new communist
international, building on the legacy of the Comintern and the
Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM). As we’ve explained
elsewhere we disagree with the creation of a new communist international
at this time.(1)
This new ICL is truer to the Comintern than the RIM was, but remains
in the same outdated and revisionist global class analysis as RIM. The
ICL statement clearly upholds MIM’s first 2 dividing line questions,
while failing to address the third directly. MIM’s third point reads in
part:
” imperialism extracts super-profits from the Third World and in part
uses this wealth to buy off whole populations of oppressor nation
so-called workers. These so-called workers bought off by imperialism
form a new petty-bourgeoisie called the labor aristocracy. These classes
are not the principal vehicles to advance Maoism within those countries
because their standards of living depend on imperialism.”(2)
Arguably, this line was somewhat controversial in the mid-1980s, when
MIM struggled against the RIM’s Revolutionary Communist Party(U$A) on
this question. The ICL statement addresses the question in most depth
with the following:
“The economic crisis in 2008 that began as a finance crisis in the
USA was unloaded on the masses in the oppressed countries and even in
the imperialist countries themselves. Thus it has stricken the
proletariat of the imperialist countries, which instigated sharp
struggles for the defense of the achievements they conquered throughout
the 20th Century. The consequences of this crisis were not overcame,
this is why the recovering of employment is at the expense of worse
quality, lower wages and larger working day. The recovering is at the
expense of increasing the over-exploitation of the class.”(3)
We have never heard of “over-exploitation” in the context of humyn
labor before, so defining that term seems important here. The text is
correct to recognize that the crisis of 2008 was mostly pushed off onto
the oppressed countries. The rest is sufficiently vague, while touching
on some common cries of the social fascists. There is no summation
elsewhere in this wordy statement of the class (or nation or gender)
alliances of the populations of the imperialist countries. We are left
with the impression that they are allies, even if they suffer less than
most. To uphold this revisionist class analysis in 2022 is to ignore
some crucial lessons from the experience of the RIM itself.
While upholding the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR),
this statement upholds the very ideas that the GPCR stood to combat –
those of the Theory of the Productive Forces. It is inconsistent to deny
the Theory of the Productive Forces and maintain that people in the top
10% global income bracket are the proletariat. Elsewhere we observe,
“Another lesson that MIM seemed to take from the great reversal in
Peru, was the importance of having a correct global class analysis for
Maoists everywhere. If a revolution based in the non-Spanish speaking
indigenous peoples of the highlands of the Andes mountains and the
Amazon rainforest is infiltrated by agents trained in the United $tates
and divided by a magazine out of London, then we see the real material
impacts of Third World communists seeing the people of the United $tates
and Great Britain as 90% proletarian allies. Not to mention, to not
understand the basic political economy of imperialism today is to lack a
Marxist framework from which to change the world.”(4)
Our disagreement with the formation of an ICL itself is largely
connected to our line on the labor aristocracy. But it also stands as
its own point on strategy in our current conditions.
The RIM criticized Mao for not building a communist international. It
seems the UMIC may agree with this critique based on their actions.
A difference in class/national interests between parties in the UMIC
is one reason we believe it is a faulty strategy. At best, the oppressor
nation parties will slow down the oppressed, at worse they will sabotage
them. Another problem is the mixing of parties engaged in armed struggle
with those that are not. This difference in strategic stage calls for
different approaches based on different interests. Yet the statement
announces that these parties are being held to democratic centralism
with each other through the ICL.
Step Forward on Stalin
One point where we see the UMIC statement disagree with RIM, and in a
good way, is in their assessment of Stalin during World War II and the
overall theory and practice of the united front. Not only does the
statement uphold the line of the Comintern during this period, it puts
the blame squarely on the parties where revisionism took over. This is
better than the RIM line (still upheld by many in the International
Communist Movement (ICM) to this day), which criticizes the Comintern
for rightism in its call for a united front against fascism. But MIM
went even further than the UMIC in disagreeing with this critique of the
Comintern to say that in countries like the United $tates there was no
revolutionary path to take at the time. Even if the CP-U$A had a correct
revolutionary line, there’s nothing they could have done that would have
supported the USSR more than what they did, given their conditions.
Those conditions being a base in the labor aristocracy.
The proliferation of statements and organizations upholding various
tenants of Maoism offers some signs of Maoism being a living science
that would-be revolutionaries are grappling with. Of course, the
practice of People’s War does this a million times more.
Of all the controversies that have been taken up in the ICM in recent
years, we have seen no public debate over the global class analysis. If
you are operating in a Third World country and isolating yourself from
the oppressor nations, then you could get very far without saying much
on the topic of the labor aristocracy in the imperialist countries. But
if you wish to engage in international conferences and you fail to
recognize the class reality on the ground, you mislead and endanger the
revolutionary movement.
A Note on Struggle Sessions
In our previous essay on this topic we
criticized author Joshua Moufawad-Paul and the blog Struggle Sessions
for advocating for a new International. On 2 January 2023, Struggle
Sessions editor deleted all their articles and posted a declaration of
the death of the project. This comes after a series of announcements and
critiques coming from the former Committee for the Reconstitution of the
Communist Party U$A (CRCPUSA), of which Struggle Sessions was
an unofficial theoretical mouthpiece. We hope to further investigate
lessons from the collapse of the CRCPUSA.
It is worth noting to our readers that the outlet publishing the
statement of the UCIM discussed here is a political ally of the CRCPUSA
and continues to support it as a project. They call themselves
Communist International: Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Online
Newspaper and are found at ci-ic.org.
Do you have any case decisions of the stimulus checks. I just
received a check for the first two payments plus interest. It totaled
$1,900.76. Of this amount TDCJ deducted $1,786.11 leaving me with
$114.65.
This is the first money I’ve had where I could go to “store” since I
got here in 2015. The deductions were for medical co-pay, indigent
correspondence and postage, and federal court fees. Another prisoner
told me that there was a federal court decision in Arkansas against the
prison system forcing them to return money deducted from prisoners’
accounts. I’m rough drafting a Step 1 grievance right now to start the
exhaustion process, then I’ll add it to the suit I’ve already started. I
intend to do the same on this censorship of ULK 79 as well. Any
information will help.
Clay v. Director of IRS Mnuchin No4:21-CV-08132-PJH
Sub Class Representative Thomas H. Clay advises all prisoners who
filed for EIP from Oct. 2020 – August of 2021 and did Not receive any
check in mail or Direct Deposit. After filing Form 1040/1040SR or letter
with SSI# and copy of such to show proof of filing; then write To:
United States District Court Northern District of California Oakland
Division Attn: Hon. Clerk/Presiding Judge 1301 Clay Street Ste 400 S
Oakland California 94612-5212
If you are filing the following criteria below:
1.Non-disabled or physically or mentally impaired prisoner in State
or Federal Prison Institution in the United States
2.Correctly filing legal letters to IRS or 1040/1040SR Form 2019/2020
from October 15,2020 thru tax season of January – August 17, 2021
3.Utilizing only Institutional Regular Legal/or Indigent Legal Mail
System in State of Federal Prisons.
Who did not receive any payment from IRS of EIP #1 #2
#3
5.In the form of “Check in Mail” or “Direct Deposit to Account”.
6.Who can “Prove upon Request” proof of the correct timely filing by:
copies of letters to the IRS office in your State area, Prison Mail Room
Record of Legal Mail logged letters showing IRS address. Indigent
mailing file showing letter sent to IRS or 1040/1040SR copies or
responses from IRS during that period from any of its offices.
7.And you were not issued any checks for EIP #1 $600.00 EIP #2
$1200.00 or CVRP/EIP #3 $1400.00 totaling $3,200.00
The court is reviewing Contempt of Court Order and Sub Class Action
from prior suit *Scholl v. Mnuchin that does not protect the rights to
amount of payment withheld from prisoners in a discriminatory manner by
IRS.
Section 272(d)(2) of the Consolidated Appropriations Act provides
that the second round of stimulus checks ‘shall not be transferable or
assignable, at law or in equity, and no applicable payment shall be
subject to execution, levy, attachment, garnishment, or other legal
process, or the operation of any bankruptcy or insolvency law.’ This
means that this round of stimulus checks may not be garnished to cover
overdue debts by federal or state prisons.
Scholl v. Mnuchin, et al. No.4:20-cv-05309-PJH ND Cal.; Appeal
Docket No. 20-16915 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of
prisoners getting stimulus checks while incarcerated. The checks in
question should not be confused with the most recent $1400 checks under
current President Joseph Biden. It was the $1200 and $600 checks under
President Donald Trump that were ruled on.
The Court ordered ADC to place any federal relief and stimulus funds
in a sequestered account if it continues to confiscate those funds. It
must maintain records of how much money it confiscates from each
prisoner and what amount is paid for court fines, fees, costs, and
restitution. While ADC may return the confiscated excess funds to
prisoners, it may not otherwise disburse those funds until the end of
the lawsuit. See: Lamar v. Hutchinson, USDC, ED AR, Case
No. 4-21-cv-00529 (2021).
The Court then turned to decide whether confiscation of the money was
a violation of procedural due process. It found no violation when it
came to confiscation for the purpose of paying off court fines, fees,
costs, or restitution.
It did, however, find a violation when it comes to diverting the
excess funds to the inmate welfare fund and the Inmate Care and Custody
Account. The Court noted there were no post deprivation remedies
available, for the ADC’s grievance procedure provides a challenge to
“issues controlled by State or Federal law or regulation” a
“non-grievable issue.” The Court concluded the confiscation of the
monies did not violate substantive due process or the Takings
Clause.
We hope this information is helpful. While we still stand by the
conclusion that these stimulus checks are an attempt to buy off the U$
population at the expense of the third world, we won’t hold unrealistic
notions about how this money can be used for our goals of
Anti-Imperialism and building up USW. We also have a censorship pack
available as well, having relevant caselaw and regulations for fighting
censorship on the legal front.
Notes: Prison Legal News, Nov 1 2021, Preliminary Injunction
Bars Arkansas from Confiscating Prisoners’ COVID Stimulus
Money
