Under Lock & Key

i enjoyed comrade Grim’s article on Christian Zionism and the prison tablet propaganda. i wanted to comment a little since Grim asked for comments from TX comrades.

Comrade Grim was spot on with what was said about the ideas and ideals driving Christian Zionism generally and as it manifests itself in the prison tablet space.

Regarding the group Grim mentioned by name, Real Vida TV, i was able to work closely with Real Vida while organizing on behalf of Texas T.E.A.M. O.N.E. At the time their line on solitary confinement was that they saw it as torture and that it should be shut down in its totality. This matched Our own line on solitary confinement and Real Vida was willing and did assist us in spreading Our message, connecting us with interested groups and opening their platform up to us and our supporters. At the time it was only an audio radio show, not a podcast, and there were no tablets. They also acted as communication assistants helping us make important contacts with each other from plantation to plantation as we organized a state-wide hunger strike against solitary confinement. All this is to say that at the time we had a working relationship, regardless of their Christian Zionist beliefs.

However, this changed after Operation Al-Aqsa flood. Personally speaking i couldn’t even listen to the garbage they were spewing let alone look past it. Ties were severed. To me the question of the Third World proletariat and the Palestinian nationalist struggle far out-weighs the U.$. prisoner class-based struggles.

They’re the most reactionary manifestation of the christian prison ministries and also one of the most popular. A lot of their videos are widely discussed afterwards and i’ve had more than a few disputes and even fisticuffs surrounding the B.S. they spew. The cold truth is that as MIM(Prisons) says, not all prisoners are swayed by this garbage. But the Palestinian struggle has unearthed the reactionary, patriotic amerikkkan spirit among the lumpen here. What i observe is that only the most politically and socially conscious prisoners side with the Palestinian struggle, and this is the minority.

The tablets play a role in that they have very limited selection of voices and ideas, particularly on this sort of issue. Pando App dominates the landscape and prior to March 2024, when podcasts were uploaded onto all tablets, Pando was basically the only source of entertainment. i have filed complaints concerning discrimination in content that is available on the KA Lite app, which is an education app that has a wide variety of scientific and hard historical factual knowledge, but the prison admin has to allow permission to download content. My complaint came after observing that there was no content concerning Africa, the Black Liberation struggle, and anti-colonial revolutions. Although these videos have been made by the app creator, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) has not allowed us access to the content. i also filed a complaint on the podcast platform for similar reasons but pertaining solely to Palestine.

The final comment is that outside comrades have to begin to get their content on the music and/or podcast platforms. i sent a previous note to MIM(Prisons) on how to do that with the Securus people.

Firewater of USW also responded: Grim, read your article in ULK 86. I totally agree with you about the Christian religion and these “evangelists” supporting mass murder and exploitation around the world. The people at Real Vida are real nice folks, but they are brainwashed and misguided like all Christians. We need to be able to copy what they do only for our revolutionary work.

We need to be doing what Real Vida is doing but like you said the Christian Zionists have a monopoly on these tablets and it needs to be broken up! I was in medium and high security and all we could watch was “Pando App”, which is nothing but Christian Evangelists and we have an FYI App that is run by TDCJ and is all Jesus all the time!

TDCJ is run by these Christian Chapels and they oppress other religions such as Muslim, Native American, Eastern religions, etc. The Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF) Unitarian Universalists’ Prison Ministry said that the “PANDO” App would not allow the CLF to participate. Probably because the PANDO folks are right-wing evangelical kooks and the CLF and UUA are extremely liberal organizations.

Grim is right on when ey talks about the genocide of Turtle Island and the raping and pillaging of Mother Earth’s treasures. They love to tout capitalism as the greatest engine of wealth ever created. But it’s like Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the farm animals are ruled by their newly formed governance of PIGS!

I have received two much-needed documents from you: “How to Form an Effective Study Group” and the “Revolutionary 12 Step Program” during the holy month of Black August. During Black August (B.A.) there were three young neophytes who also embarked on the journey of Kebuka (remembrance) by studying the works and examples of ancestors, comrades and many of the beautiful souls that sparked the momentous flow of resistance.

Prior to B.A., I was invited to a think tank class where the serious minded men here can come into a space to talk, think and reflect on solutions to problems that plague the prison population and society at large.

After attending a few of the sessions I realized the class lacked a starting point to build and grow on.

However, I shared the 12 Step Program with the facilitator, and the brothers all agreed that the layout was a great format and that the five principles of the United Front for Peace in Prisons enumerated on page 2 of ULK should be the pillars that hold this class.

Thanking you for all the tireless work that’s being put in.

We hope those who have been following our series of articles this week have been both angered by what is going on inside U.$. prisons and inspired to action. (see campaign link below to read previous articles)

MIM(Prisons) is in a period of growth, after some setbacks. In recent years we’ve gradually reinstated each of our 3 different levels of correspondence study courses for prisoners. Just this summer we put out a long-planned Reference Guide that contains historical timelines, maps and a glossary to provide background for many of the things we talk about regularly. We’ve released the Revolutionary 12 Steps Program and Power To New Afrika, both written by prisoners, in the last couple years. We continue to put out Under Lock & Key every three months. And we’ve updated a number of other study packs and resources. And we do it all out of our own pockets and volunteer time. So if you can spare some money or some time to support us it can go a long way.

By the time this series of articles reaches most of our readers inside, in Under Lock & Key 87, the holiday season will be approaching. In that spirit and inspired by all this talk about banned books, we are pledging to mail out more books this winter than any other winter in the 2020s so far!

Please see our get involved page for ways to donate and other ways to help out. Outside supporters can help us make this happen by sending cash or stamps, helping acquire in demand books like dictionaries, Black Panther Party, or Marxist classics, or by volunteering in various ways. All of the new publications listed above have been censored in various prisons, even the Reference Guide was censored in Michigan’s Thumb Correctional Facility for being more than 12 pages long! So continued campaigning and legal support is much needed.

Prisoners can help us get more books out by taking the steps to join our Serve the People Free Political Books to Prisoners Program. Get others to sign up for a subscription to ULK or become a distributor of ULK in your prison. Let us know what organizing work you are doing, what your local study group is discussing, what questions are coming up for you and your comrades. By doing these things you can receive books to help with your local work and studies. We have books on Black/New Afrikan studies, Chican@ studies, First Nation studies, gender, economics, history of Chinese socialism, the Soviet Union, books by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao and more.

As we approach the end of Prison Banned Book Week we are pausing our campaign, which has been going on over the last couple months, to support prisoners in Pendleton Correctional Facility, Indiana. Supporters should stop gathering signatures and mail out any remaining postcards soon.

It was reported to MIM(Prisons) that 6 prisoners were threatened with drug charges, and torture in long-term isolation, for mail received from MIM Distributors. The mailroom claimed smudges of ink (that were obviously from the printer) were indications that the mail was laced with drugs. Of course, subsequent testing of the mail proved there were no drugs on them. This type of treatment has earned Indiana state a grade of D for their mail censorship, not an F because most letters do get through as does some literature.

In response to these threats, comrades in Anti-Imperialist Prisoner Support (AIPS) and other supporters hit the streets with a postcard campaign. We told people about what was going on, and asked them to sign a postcard and mail it to the administration. The postcards called out the political repression and demanded that it be stopped. Dozens of postcards were mailed to the Pendleton Administration, from near and far away, over the last couple months.

In the midst of the postcard campaign we received news that the threats had seemingly been dropped. But censorship has continued and a lawsuit is still being pursued. One of the comrades targeted at Pendleton says:

“I have not received Under Lock & Key 86 mailed out [1 month ago]. I’ve written the mailroom 2 times now and as of today have not received it.”

Ey did receive our article on the postcard campaign, which has been copied and distributed around the prison. Ey says:

“Thank you all for bringing this injustice to light!”

Thanks to the comrades on the outside who supported this campaign. We are declaring this phase over, but will continue to report on the happenings in Indiana prisons.

Outreach Report

In one locale, over 35 petitions were collected alongside distributing ULK 86 directly to passerbys. There was substantial immediate enthusiasm for discovering a publication written by prisoners, especially regarding solidarity with Palestine. Each persyn AIPS met was interested both in receiving a newsletter as well as signing a petition to mail.

AIPS also maintained a presence at Socialism Conference 2024 which took place in Chicago during the end of August. Here, over 100 copies of ULK were handed out and dozens of postcard petitions were signed by those interested in the struggle of prisoners. It was also encouraging to see those on the outside were interested in learning about the abuses and injustices prisoners face, either through attending panels hosted at the conference or by talking directly with passer-bys.

While there was no negative reception, no recipients in either location were familiar with ULK or MIM(Prisons). Only very few recognized the MIM name from prior exposure. It is indicative of a low tide in the movement here that most are completely unfamiliar with anti-imperialist prisoners. This represents an opportunity and responsibility to publicize our work and recruit more volunteers.

Among this small sample of the public, found tabling in busy urban areas, at local leftist events, or at the aforementioned conference, there were multiple people who were very enthusiastic about the newspaper and our work in spite of lacking all prior familiarity. This welcome enthusiasm also resulted in some “pig questions”: those which, if AIPS answered publicly, would inevitably feed valuable information to the pigs (in other words, agents of the state). The size of a political group, their location, and their leadership structure are examples of questions unnecessary to answer in order to work with others. That information only helps enemies who wish to study, surveil or even infiltrate anti-imperialist organizations. And we don’t say this to pretend that we are a big organization but rather to encourage people to do the work that they see as the most correct.

AIPS comrades encountered some popular confusion about MIM(Prisons)’s line on (non)exploitation of prisoners. Some people thought MIM(Prisons) was fighting against the for-profit prison system. Most prisons are not private. And even companies like JPay, Securus, and GTL that are profiteering off prisoners are making very small amounts of money compared to the cost of running the criminal injustice system, which the Prison Policy Institute put at about $182 billion. MIM(Prisons)’s actual line is that prisons are an immense cost to Amerika: a cost sustained for the purpose of social control, especially for the national oppression of First Nation, New Afrikan and Chican@ liberation movements. In the end, this cost is worthwhile if Amerika is able to prevent the masses of oppressed nations from fighting for autonomy in land and resources. But still, the benefits yielded are not profits in terms of capital but the containment and suppression of the internal semi-colonies within the United $tates. Imprisonment is a form of absolute immiseration that we think of in the realm of genocide rather than exploitation. The suppression of rebellious groups helps the settler Amerikan nation maintain its position on top. AIPS incorporates this understanding in our prisoner correspondence and campaign work.

There are 65 organizations who have signed on to the 2024 Prison Banned Books Week campaign. What unites us is a belief that there is good in lifting the restrictions on literature that U.$. prisoners have access to. Without having asked all of the participants, we’d wager that we all agree that by understanding the past and understanding the ideas of others, that people can better understand our present and act on it in a way that benefits humynity overall. There are certain ideas that we may take from the Age of the Enlightenment that we all share.

Finding Truth in Books

Where many of the organizations in this campaign probably disagree with us is in seeing that each piece of literature has a class character to it. As part of our world view as Marxists, we recognize that, in a class society, there is class character in everything humyns create..

There is an adage that the truth is hidden in books. But as we’ve discussed before, not all books are true or based in materialist science.(1) In a sense, we go to the library and read books to bury the lies within books and all around us. We must understand different arguments and ways of thinking in order to see their accuracy or fallacy.

Rather than think of the “marketplace of ideas” where a bunch of people bring their individual thoughts to compete with others (the individualist view), we see a war between two main class positions in the realm of ideas (and elsewhere) – that of the bourgeoisie vs. that of the proletariat. There is a reason why prisoners are the most restricted readers in this country, and why New Afrikan, Indigenous and Chican@ literature are targeted as “Security Threat Group” material.

Cultural Revolution

If there is one phenomenon that defines Maoism, it is the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in China (1966-1976) and the lessons learned from it. But wait, didn’t they like burn books and punish academics during the GPCR?

In essence, the GPCR was an unleashing of almost a billion people to participate in the war between the proletarian and the bourgeois lines in politics and production. Not only that, this was a people that were more than 90% illiterate before the liberation of China by the Communist Party in 1949.

“My conclusion… was that China had made greater progress in liberating masses of people from illiteracy and bringing millions some knowledge of scientific and industrial technique than any nation had ever done in so short a time.

“…By 1960… about $2,600,000,000) was devoted to education and science, or fifty percent more than the direct budgetary military expenditure….

“In 1960 United States expenditure on education at all levels was less than four percent of the national income, or slightly less than the $18,000,000,000 Americans spent for alcoholic beverages and tobacco.

“In 1957 Premier Chou En-lai had estimated illiteracy over the whole country at seventy percent. Mr Tsui said that by 1960 the percentage had been reduced… to about sixty-six percent for the rural areas and twenty-four percent in the cities.”(2)

By 1979, three years after the GPCR, illiteracy was down to 30%.(3) Yet the GPCR is known in the United $tates for shutting down schools and attacking professors. These things were central to the student struggles on campuses across China. And in these struggles there were Red Guard factions taking up different positions and political lines, fighting against each other. Students were challenging the hierarchical roles in the university and the traditional methods of study, without always having the answers. There are even documented cases of Red Guards burning religious books as a means of attacking reactionary ideas. But this was not a coordinated effort by the state as is happening in prisons and schools across the United $tates today, the so-called “land of the free”. We can see parallels to the critiques of the Chinese student movement in the United $tates today where “right to an education” is being used to silence protests against U.$. arms being used for a genocide in Palestine.

Interestingly, after praising Chinese literacy in the quote above, Edgar Snow quotes a U.$. Library of Congress staffer stating that the Chinese concept of education “is not distinguishable from indoctrination, propaganda and agitation.”(2) This is where we would again stress the class perspective, and how propaganda is in the eye of the beholder:

“Westerners perceive Chinese education under Mao as”propaganda,” because it encourages values and goals which contradict the goals of capitalism. These values and goals taught in China during the Cultural Revolution were consistent with the building of socialism. Education in Western nations is not perceived as “propaganda” by those who, consciously or not, agree with the goals of capitalism/imperialism and patriarchy. Similarly, advertising for capitalist products, while recognized as very influential on people’s opinions and actions, is not perceived as “brain-washing” by those who benefit from capitalism and have therefore decided to tolerate it.”(4)

The totalitarian control of corporations like Global Tel*Link, JPay, and Securus over what prisoners read, write, listen to and communicate with people outside is a good example of what our society accepts.

Allyn and Adele Ricket wrote about their experience as prisoners in China for providing intelligence to the United $tates Government. This is one of the best accounts of the Chinese socialist approach to education/re-education. They were imprisoned during the early years of the revolution and witnessed the change in approach, partially due to changing conditions (the new government had been established and prisoners were less rebellious) and partially due to lessons learned. “By 1953… the authorities acknowledged that their former overemphasis on suppression had been a mistake.”(5)

Their description of staff at their prison sounds unbelievable to a U.$. prisoner:

“he always seemed to have time to listen to the troubles of one or another of the prisoners or to do countless little things which showed how serious he was in looking out for the welfare of his charges.”

At first Allyn Rickett thought this was a bit of a propaganda show, but this incident changed eir mind:

“I looked through the crack in the palisade built around our cell window to obstruct the view. There was Supervisor Shen patiently going along the line turning every article of the prisoners’ clothing to make certain they would be dry by the time we were to take them in after supper.”(6)

Regarding censorship, the Ricketts also compare the news in China over time and to the Amerikan press:

“Publication of news is determined by its usefulness in increasing the people’s social consciousness and morality and furthering the Communist Party’s program for the development of the country. Therefore the content of the news is limited to what the authorities feel will serve these ends.

“To our mind, no matter how sincere in their purpose the authorities may be, in violating the principle of the right to know they are taking a dangerous step. …One of the most encouraging recent developments in China has been a liberalization of this concept of a controlled press. [written in 1957]

“…Our experience in living in and reading the press of both countries has led us to the conclusion that the Chinese today are still receiving a clearer picture of what is happening here than the American people are of what is taking place in China.”(7)

Ten years later the GPCR will begin and “big character posters” were promoted as a way for the masses to express their grievances against Party officials, or other issues they faced. The Chinese experiment in socialism was unique in how it regularly attempted to open up mass participation in ideological struggle and in organizing society as far as could be tolerated without creating chaos. And even then there was some chaos, which is what the GPCR is usually criticized for.

The press is a battleground for class struggle. In a condition where all the books were bourgeois, the socialist government had a lot of work to do to catch up. And this was done largely in face-to-face study groups, whether on campuses, on farms or in prisons.

The ideas of the old system must be surpassed, but not erased. Marx showed how different economic systems gave birth to subsequent systems, and how the ideas evolved to reflect those new systems. This is all important to the understanding of humyn history and to the development and continued advancement of humyn knowledge.

<sup>Notes: 1. Melo X, August 2022, Are Ideas in a Book Materialist?, Under Lock & Key 79.
2. Snow, Edgar, 1970, Red China Today, Random House: New York, pp.229-231.
3. MAOIST INTERNATIONALIST MOVEMENT POSITION PAPER ON VIOLENCE, PART II, 26 August 1992
4. MC5, November 1999, Myths About Maoism.
5. Ricket, Allyn & Adele, 1973, Anchor Books: New York, p.235.
6. Ibid., p.236-7
7. Ibid., p.331</sup>

A North Carolina prisoner writes: Dear comrades, I’ve enclosed a banned book/publications list put out by our prison.

I can’t get or make copies. Nobody can help me with copies. North Carolina prisons want all non-legal mail sent to Phoenix, MD for electronic scanning that takes up to two weeks to be done. Yet legal mail, books and newsletters are sent to the prisons themselves. Any idea what a burden that is? Our people got to remember two different addresses. Organizations have to mail us letter replies to one address and books to another.

This prison blocks almost all sexual mags, even non-nude, even though NC-DAC policy approves such books. Not Harnett Correctional Institution.

Notice the date? This is the banned book list I was given in June 2024. Any book past a year is supposed to be re-reviewed. They aren’t.

Analyzing NC Ban List

Some famous titles on the list include Where the Crawdads Sing and the often-censored in U.$. schools, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Other notable items include multiple self-help books, including ones specifically for prisoners preparing for release, and prisoner resource lists. There are multiple legal resources on the list, one our comrade mentions. And there are books like Gender Studies, Qigong and Tai Chi, and an astrology book that can’t possibly violate any rules. Clearly censored for its political content is Our Enemies in Blue, a critique of policing.

Under Lock & Key is the second most censored newspaper in North Carolina, after The Final Call, which appears 14 times on the list (it also comes out a lot more frequently than ULK). Both are clearly censored for political reasons.

The book list that this comrade received in June 2024 is dated 10/06/2023. Since October 2023, the following items have been rejected by NCDPS: Under Lock & Key 82 and ULK 84, and a comrade reported not receiving Under Lock & Key 85. A prisoner appealed ULK 82, was denied, and then MIM Distributors appealed and it was removed from the Master List of Disapproved Publications. Most states have a central administrative office that oversees the local mailroom decisions to censor, so it is always worth appealing to these offices. There are no rights that you don’t fight for. Years ago many comrades went further and engaged in lawsuits over the mail in North Carolina, which seems to have brought improvements in their practices in recent years.

By our count, at least 100 of the 480 items on the ban list contain sexual content, most of them containing pornographic photos. While this comrade points out that sexual content is not a reason for banning per the law, North Carolina Department of Adult Corrections policy Chapter D 0.0109(f)(11) does prohibit “Sexually explicit material which by its nature or content poses a threat to the security, good order, or discipline of the institution, or facilitates criminal activity.” It is not clear how any of the materials in question fit this criteria. Curiously, right after the release of this ban list, Under Lock & Key 79 was censored for the reason “naked woman’s breast”, which just isn’t true at all, but should also not have been allowed by their own rules.

The only topic to rival pornography on the ban list was “street novels.” We counted at least 100 examples on this list (we did not look up every title so these are likely undercounted). Most likely these are censored for (f)(10) related to promoting “gang activity.”

The third most common topic on the ban list appeared to be tattoo-related, with at least 20 examples. Other themes that appeared more than a few times, in order of frequency, included: art, history of famous criminals, cars, guns, survival, hacker, legal, and martial arts. Unfortunately we have no real information on the literature that was not put on the ban list to compare to.

According to the PEN America Index of School Book Bans, there were 58 books banned in various school districts across North Carolina in 2023. While the news reports more on banned books in schools, we can see that banning literature is much more frequent in prisons. And while the titles on these two lists appear to have no overlap, the motivation behind most of the banned literature seems to be an effort to not expose people to books that depict things the censors don’t want them to do.

North Carolina’s Overall Rating

Overall, we have to give North Carolina a decent grade of C+ on their mail policies and practices.

It’s unacceptable that almost every issue of Under Lock & Key seems to either be censored, or at least not delivered to some subscribers in NCDAC. This includes the recent example where they censored ULK for art depicting actions that their department describes in their own rules. However, some subscribers in North Carolina have received every recent issue of Under Lock & Key. There has been a major improvement since 2012-2017 when censorship was so rampant in North Carolina that we couldn’t even get a letter in telling a prisoner what mail we’ve sent them.

And yes, the multiple addresses are a burden as our comrade says. Pennsylvania has three! You can see our list of mail censored in North Carolina prisons over the last couple years and see that even when newspapers and pamphlets were sent to the facility they were sometimes returned stating, “This facility DOES NOT accept friend and family mail directly.” And there were times where mail printed on 8.5”x11” paper was returned from TextBehind stating: Refused “TextBehind, INC does not process privileged/legal mail”. It is clear these systems are confusing to all involved.

Assuming those were honest mistakes, there hasn’t really been any censorship of books or pamphlets from MIM Distributors in recent years (just our newsletter), including some of our most censored literature in other states. And this would not likely be the case if it weren’t for the prisoners who fought censorship with appeals and lawsuits less than a decade ago.

We just wrapped up our Fourth of You-Lie annual fundraiser. The results so far aren’t great. We’ve only received about a third of the number of donations we got from comrades inside for all of 2023, and less than a third in the amount received. That means we need to get twice as many donations in the next 6 months as we got in the first 6 months of this year to maintain where we were. And ideally, we want to be increasing the percent of funding that comes from donations from prisoners. The amount of donations we receive from prisoners is one way we measure mass support for our work and whether we should keep doing it.

Our education programs continue to develop. We’ve mailed out the first group response to our University of Maoist Thought study group on the Collected Works of the Black Liberation Army. We’ve completed an update to our study guide for The Fundamentals of Political Economy, a must-read text. Comrades on the outside also completed a study of MIM Theory 14: United Front that is reflected in the content of this issue. We will likely continue this theme in ULK 87, looking at the united front in Palestine more and printing your reports on building united front for the September 9th Day of Peace and Solidarity.

We are also entering Black August as this issue hits the cell blocks. And soon after that, the September 9th Day of Peace and Solidarity. Besides the Runaway Slaves Coalition statement on the United Front for Peace in Prisons, we did not get any submissions on these topics. But as always we have our September 9th Organizing Pack that prisoners can request to get more information on the history of this day, and countless books and pamphlets on the Black liberation struggle that you can get from our Free Books to Prisoners Program in exchange for political work.

The week of December 6-13 has been marked as a week of solidarity by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak. Over the years comrades have suggested a boycott of any activities that financially benefit the prison system. This is the tactic being implemented in December, with the campaign focusing on ending prison slavery and overall abolition of prisons in general. Our next issue will be out in early November. So if you are organizing for this week of solidarity, send in art or articles to share for ULK 87.

This issue features content produced by United Struggle from Within comrades as part of our campaign to connect the prison struggle to the student movement for Palestine. Some of these materials were also used in a pamphlet put together and distributed on the streets, to get these messages into the hands of students and outside supporters.

As we finalize the content for this issue, reports are coming in of the disproportionate deaths of prisoners in the recent heat waves. Prisoners and prisons are being excluded from new worker protection laws dealing with heat. This June was the hottest on record. And yet the imperialists still aren’t getting serious about reducing CO2 emissions to slow global warming. We welcome your reports on heat and climate change, especially organizing efforts and how to build a united front around these campaigns, for the next issue of ULK.

Amerikan Elections

Finally, i thought we should say a few words on the upcoming U.$. presidential election. For those that don’t know, our slogan is, “Don’t Vote, Organize!” We aren’t too interested in who becomes president because there is no anti-imperialist option.

As has become the trend, the Democratic Party wing have been campaigning hard to “stop fascism”. Our line has not changed since 2016, when we argued that Trump was not instituting fascism as president then either. But that does not mean we should not be vigilantly looking for the emergence of fascism and opportunities to combat it.

Comrades in Texas have reported on lumpen gangs being used by the state as enforcers in Coffield Unit and Allred Unit. Another reader in Allred more recently reported that staff using drugs to bribe prisoners has continued:

“The prison administration here at Allred Unit have been getting away with killing prisoners for so long with the help of these so-called gang members that they fear not the possibility of accountability.”

The use of gangs to police prisoners is not new in Texas history. However, in the past this role was filled by the euro-Amerikan prisoners who enjoyed privileges in exchange for enforcing discipline on the oppressed nation prisoners.(see Robert T. Chase’s book We Are Not Slaves) While we have written extensively on the revolutionary potential of the First World lumpen, and even lumpen organizations, these organizations also have this reactionary potential, making them an unreliable ally of the proletariat.

In fact, it is quite damning that these L.O.s are consciously working for the imperialists to violently repress other oppressed nationals. We address this further in this issue with the ongoing campaign (and debate) around “Stop Collaborating!” Of course we see the same thing in Third World countries around the world where the imperialist have built death squads by bribing various lumpen and military men. And we do recognize such death squads as a form of exported fascism with no real base in the Third World itself.

Here in the heart of empire it is more typical to see the euro-Amerikan petty bourgeoisie play the role of fascist foot soldiers. We saw a glimpse of this in the attacks of bands of young white men on the UCLA encampment for Palestine as cops idly stood by. And we’ve seen it in various street clashes over the last decade with groups like the Proud Boys attacking radical left demonstrators or gender-non-conforming events.

But these remain fringe events. While Trump represents a certain heightening of contradictions in this country, the U.$. state is still very stable. No one can become president of the United $tates without support from the imperialists. The current support of the ultra-rich for another Trump presidency has been pinned largely on the possibility of Trump era tax cuts expiring if Biden wins a second term. So this is hardly a sign of the imperialists recognizing the need for a strong man to move this country into a more authoritarian direction. On the contrary, it is a sign of a further eating away at the stability of the United $tates by undercutting state funding through neo-Liberalism. Yes, the contradictions are heightening, no it is not time to join in united front with Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or whoever ends up being the more status quo option they give us in November.

A Juxtaposition to the Works of Orisanmi Burton

A spear, utilized as a weapon to engage in battle, can only be effective insofar as its tip is both sturdy and sharp. And the sharpness of its tip is maintained as part of a process of sharpening in the continuum of a protracted struggle campaign. Otherwise, what you’ll have is not an implement for war, but a stick that merely rhetorically projects a technology for combat that in actuality, is incapable of immobilizing or pushing back against a harmful, even deadly force. So considering the condition of the spear, I have no intention to deal with or re-visit the “Long Attica Revolt” with historicism, relegating the event to a time in history; nor to romanticize its existence for the purposes of psycho-emotional or intellectual masturbation. Instead, I relocate the Long Attica Revolt to the present moment in hopes of creating dialogue and theory around the fundamental question of whether the “Long Attica Revolt” (i.e the prison movement) still exists?

I start my analysis of the question at the end and (epilogue) of Orisanmi Burton’s (hereinafter Ori) text with the statement:

“For many, 1993 was a watershed in the slow disintegration of the prison movement.”(1)

If 1993 marked the crucial turning point in which the prison movement started dissipating, or decomposing, what does the reality look like in 2024, 31 years after its evocation? If we are serious about “interpreting the world to change it, there is no escape from historical materialism,”(2) requiring my analysis to stay anchored to tackle the question from my direct experience as a prisoner of 21 and a half consecutive years of carceral bondage within Michigan prisons. In so doing, I stay true to Mao’s injunction to adhere to what [Vladimir] Lenin called the “most essential thing in Marxism, the living soul of Marxism, [the] concrete analysis of concrete conditions.”(3)

The “prison movement,” according to the New Afrikan analysis that I subscribe to, marked a specific moment in time that spearheaded a qualitative change, transforming issue-based prison struggles centered primarily around conditions of confinement (reform), into a movement that was influenced by and married itself to the anti-colonial national liberation struggles being waged beyond the concrete walls (revolutionary). These circumstances, having affected colonial people on a world scale, radicalized and politicized sections of the colonial subjects in the united states to such an extent where the consciousness developed inside of penal dungeons was being disseminated to the streets where it would be internalized and weaponized by agents against the state. The impetus for this qualitative leap in the substance and character of the prison movement was Johnathan Jackson’s 7 August 1970 revolutionary act of pursuing the armed liberation of the Soledad Brothers, culminating in the 9 September 1971 Attica Rebellion. This is why Ori argued the “Long Attica Revolt was a revolutionary struggle for decolonization and abolition at the site of US prisons.”(4)

While Ori’s assessment may have been correct, his very own analysis, and a concomitant analysis of present-day Michigan, exposes a revolutionary contradiction prone to reversion and therefore revolutionary (Marxist) revision by elements that were, in fact, never revolutionary or abolitionist but only radical reformist. Revisionism spells doom (death) to the prison movement, so part of our objective has got to be how do we oppose the carceral state from an ideological and practical perspective to ensure the survival of a dying prison movement, and reap benefits and successes from our struggle. After all, Ori tells us the aim of his book is “to show that US prisons are a site of war, [a] site of active combat.”(5)

Clausewitz (Carl von) observed that war was politics by other means, just as Michel Foucault reasoned politics was war by other means. War and politics being opposite sites of a single coin, this “COIN” in military jargon is none other than “counterinsurgency.” As explained in the U.S. Army Field Manual at 3-24. It defines insurgency as:

“an organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of established government, occupying power, or other political authority while increasing insurgent control.”

“The definition of counterinsurgency logically follows:”Counterinsurgency is the military, paramilitary, political economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.””

“Counterinsurgency, then, refers to both a type of war and a style of warfare”(6), whose aim is, in the context of prisons, to neutralize the prison movement and the ability of its agency to build the movement into the future.

As we can see, by isolating and extracting this point from Ori’s text, u.s. prisons as combat zones where war is waged is significant if we are to gleam from this fact what the proponents, the protagonists of the prison movement must do next; how we struggle accordingly in hopes of gaining victories.

The Master Plan

The logical response of a revolutionary tactician to state repression is resistance. But not just resistance for the sake of being recalcitrant – as Comrade George (Jackson) informed us, our fight, our resistance has to use imagination by developing a fighting style from a dialectical materialist standpoint. Because

“…we can fight, but if we are isolated, if the state is successful in accomplishing that, the results are usually not constructive in terms of proving the point. The point is, however, in the face of what we confront, to fight and win. That’s the real objective: not just make statements, no matter how noble, but to destroy the system that oppresses us.”(7)

In constructing long-term insurgency repression (counterinsurgency), the scientific technology deployed by the state was “soft power” as its effective mechanism to accomplish their task. Ori tells us the federal government drafted a “Master Plan” which hinged on “correctional professionals coming to realize that the battle is won or lost not inside the prison, but out on the sidewalks.”(8) This assessment could only be true considering the question surrounding prisons and the corollary prison movement is one of legitimacy, for only through legitimacy could the state preserve carceral normalcy. So counterinsurgency, or war, to be overtly specific, and the game is the acquisition of legitimacy from the masses (national public at-large) as a main objective. This fact should be telling that the struggle for state oppression, aggression and repression within the context of the prison movement is ultimately always a struggle for the people. Thus, “in an insurgency, both sides rely on the cooperation of the populace; therefore they compete for it, in part through coercive means.”(9) These political facts, as tactics of war, envision the real terrain in which the battle for prison lives is waged: the mental realm. It is within this domain that resistance and the legitimacy on both sides of the barb wired cage will be won.

The prisoner population must take cues from these facts. The very first recognition has got to be that prisons, deployed as war machines, cannot possibly be legitimate if we (the prisoners) have been cast as the enemies the state seeks to annihilate as human beings by re-converting us from second-class citizens back to slaves. This was the very point Ori lets us in on regarding Queen Mother Moore’s August 1973 visit and speech in Green Haven Prison in New York, that New Afrikans were in fact enduring “re-captivity.”(10) Blacks have long hoisted this argument, lamenting an amendment to the 13th Amendment to the u.s. constitution, and a host of case law, like the case of Ruffin v Commonwealth cited by Ori, have declared “incarcerated people slaves of the state.”(11) And as slaves, to borrow the words of George, “the sole phenomenon that energizes my whole consciousness is, of course, revolution.” In this vein the prison movement is partially about the survival of the humanity of prisons, their dignity, which requires the survival of the spirit of the prison movement. This is what Chairman Fred Hampton meant when he said “You can kill a freedom fighter, but you can’t kill freedom fighting. You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill revolution.” It is this very same deprivation of human dignity that Huey talked about resulting in what I’m experiencing among Michigan prisoners, who are largely “immobilized by fear and despair, he sinks into self-murder”.(12) But even more dangerous to Huey than self-murder, is spiritual death, what Huey witnessed become a “common attitude… driven to death of the spirit rather of the flesh.”

So the very idea (spirit) of the prison movement must survive, must be kept alive, or, “your method of death can itself be a politicizing thing.”(13). And this is precisely the reality Michigan’s male prisoners have succumbed to, death of spirit, death by de-politicization.

All this begs the question posed by George: What is our fighting style in face of political death? This question can only be answered against the background of the statement: “For many, 1993 was a watershed in the slow disintegration of the prison movement,” because the reality shouts out to us that the prison movement has diminished to such a degree, it’s in desperate need of being incubated back to life (if it still exists at all).

Thus far it has been made clear that at issue is the survival of the prison movement which means by extension a revival of the political life of prisoners. The catalyst breeding political consciousness can only be education. As Ori illuminates, part of the prisoner war project requires guerrilla warfare, the life of which itself is grounded in political education.(14) Ori himself writes in the acknowledgment section of Tip of the Spear that he sharpened his spear (political analysis) by tying himself to a network of intellectuals and study groups, like Philly-based podcast Millenials Are Killing Capitalism.

The Role of Outside Supporters

The “Master Plan” developed by the state concluded “that the battle is won or lost not inside the prison, but out on the sidewalks,” and this leads directly to the utility of individuals and organizations outside the confines of prison life to be leveraging against the subjects inside the walls. Yet, it must not be lost upon us that by virtue of the state’s “Master Plan”, they seek to weaponize outside organizations as tools to drive a nail in the coffin of the prison movement once and for all. Proponents of the prison movement, accordingly, must also utilize and weaponize outside agency to advance the prison movement. When asked, although George said, “A good deal of this has to do with our ability to communicate to people on the street,” we must nevertheless be sure not to allow this communication or the introduction of outside volunteers to stifle the spirit of the movement.

Ori hits the nail on the head when exposing the “Master Plan” to absorb outside volunteers as part of the “cynical logic of programmification, with well-meaning volunteers becoming instruments of pacification.”(15) I spoke to this very phenomena in 2021 essay entitled “Photograph Negatives: The Battle For Prison Intelligentsia”, in response to a question posed to me by Ian Alexander, an editor of True Leap Press’s “In The Belly” publication, on whether outside university intellectuals could follow the lead of imprisoned-intellectuals? There I mentioned how Michigan’s outside volunteers near absolute adherence to prison policy, designed to constrain and be repressive, retarded our ability to be subversive and insurgent, called into question the purpose of the university-intellectuals infiltration of the system in the first instance. And while “many of these volunteers undoubtedly had altruistic and humanitarian motives, they unwittingly perpetuated counterinsurgency in multiple ways.”(16)

The battle for prison intellgentsia itself creates an unspoken tension between the inside (imprisoned) and outside (prison) intellectuals to the detriment of the prison movement, benefiting the state’s “Master Plan.” As I cited in “Photograph Negatives,” Joy James correctly analyzes that it is the imprisoned intellectuals that are “most free of state condition.” Scholar Michel-Rolph Troillot’s insight also champions that imprisoned intellectuals, “non-academics are critical producers of historiography,”(17) yet, as Eddie Ellis told Ori during a 2009 political education workshop, “We have never been able to use the tools of academia to demonstrate that our analysis is a better analysis.”(18) This fact further substantiates my position in response to editor Ian Alexander that outside university-based intellectuals must take their lead from imprisoned intellectuals because (1) we are the experts, validated through our long-lived experiences; and (2) most university-intellectuals are clueless they’re being used as tools within the state’s “Master Plan” against the very prisoners that altruism is directed.

Carceral Compradors Inside

But sadly, it’s not just the outside volunteers being positioned as pawns in the state’s war against prisoners. To be sure, prisoners themselves have become state agents, be it consciously or unconsciously, pushing pacification through various behavioral modification programming that intentionally depoliticizes the prisoner population, turning them into do-gooder state actors. It is in this way that the prison state “strategically co-opted the demands of the prison movement and redeployed them in ways that strengthened their ability to dominate people on both sides of the wall.”(19)

In Michigan prisons, these compromised inmates function as “carceral compradors,” and part of the plan of this de-politicizing regime is to convince the prisoner population to surrender their agency to resist. It has been the state’s ability to appease these, what Ricardo DeLeon, a member of Attica’s revolutionary committee, said was the elements of “all the waverers, fence sitters, and opponents,”(20) exacerbating already-existing fissures, exposing the deep contradictions between a majority reformist element, and the minority revolutionary element. This success effectively split and casted backward the “prison movement” to its previously issue-based conditions of confinement struggle model by “exposing a key contradiction within the prison movement, ultimately cleaving support from the movement’s radical edge while nurturing its accomodationist tendencies.”(21)

All of this was (is) made possible because “a sizable fraction of the population that saw themselves, not as revolutionaries, but as gangsters: outlaw capitalists, committed to individual financial gain”(22), and radical reformist, despite their rhetoric to the contrary, focused rather exclusively on conditions of confinement, instead of materializing a revolutionary goal. If the prison movement is a revolutionary movement, then the revolutionary element must manage to consolidate power and be the final arbitrators of the otherwise democratic decision-making processes. Ori cites Frantz Fanon to make clear that political parties serve as “incorruptible defenders of the masses,” or, the movement will find itself vulnerable to neocolonial retrenchment.(23) The schism that emerges between these two factions, ideologically, paralyzes the prison movement. These implications obviously extend beyond the domain of prisons to the collective New Afrikan struggle on the streets, as the prison movement was fostered by national liberation struggle on the outside, lending the credence to the victory from the sidewalk notion. But in order to secure a revolutionary party-line, the revolutionary party must be the majority seated element in the cadre committee.

Perhaps this is precisely why Sam Melville, a key figure in the Attica rebellion, said it was needed to “avoid [the] obvious classification of prison reformers.”(24) This is significant because otherwise, reformists would dominate the politics, strategies and decision-making, killing any serious anti-colonial (revolutionary) ideology. Again, this is true for both the inside and outside walkways. As a corollary, this reality should cause the revolutionary-minded to seriously rethink ways in which our struggle is not subverted from within the ranks of fighters against the state who, contradictorily, are okay with the preservation and legitimization of the prison machine and its “parent” global white supremacist structure, so long as remedial measures are taken to ameliorate certain conditions.

Our Road

In advance of summarizing, let me just say I do not at all intend to imply a reformist concession can’t be viewed as a revolutionary advancement within the overall scheme of carceral war. I pivot to Rachel Herzing, co-founder of Critical Resistance, that

“an abolitionist goal would be to try to figure out how to take incremental steps – a screw here, a cog there – and make it so the system cannot continue – so it ceases to exist – rather than improving its efficiency.”

But that’s just it. The Attica reforms did not, as Rachel Herzing would accept, “steal some of the PIC’s power, make it more difficult to function in the future, or decrease it’s legitimacy in the eyes of the people.” On the contrary, the Attica reforms entrenched the system of penal legitimacy, seeded the proliferation of scientific repression, and improved upon the apparatus’s ability to forestall and dissolve abolitionist resistance. In addition, the reforms were not made with the consent of the Attica revolutionaries, but by a splintering majority of radical reformers who, in the end, the present as our proof, greased by the levers of power assenting to the machine’s pick up of speed and tenacity.

As inheritors of the prison movement, and as we consider the de-evolution of the Long Attica Revolt and all it entails, specifically its survival, we are called upon to meditate on Comrade George’s essential ask – What is our fighting style? At minimum, I suggest our task is implementing a twofold platform: (1) political education; and (2) internal revolutionary development.

First, those equipped with the organization skills and requisite consciousness, as a methodology of guerilla war, should construct political education classes. These classes should operate within study group formats. We must return to the injunction of prisons functioning as universities, that “The jails (and prisons) are the Universities of the Revolutionaries and the finishing schools of the Black Liberation Army.”(25) We align ourselves with the Prison Lives Matter (PLM) formation model and utilize these study groups to engage in:

“a concrete study and analysis of the past 50+ years, and in doing so, We learn from those who led the struggle at the highest level during the high tide (1960s and 70s), where and how the revolutionary movement failed due to a lack of cadre development, as well as knowing and maintaining a line.”(26)

Our political education study groups must also instill a pride, courage, and will to dare to struggle along the lines of New Afrikan revolutionary ideology. For desperately, “Our revolution needs a convinced people, not a conquered people.”(27) The quality of courage in the face of impending brutality by what Ori calls the state’s “carceral death machine”(28) will be necessary to put in gear the wheels of guerrilla resistance. The invocation of this spirit sets apart the human prepared to demand and indeed take his dignity by conquest, from the weak, pacified slave who rationalizes his fear, which is in fact “symptomatic of pathological plantation mentality that had been inculcated in Black people through generations of terror.”(29) This terror in the mind of Black males inside of Michigan cages is displayed at even the mention of radical (revolutionary) politics, inciting a fear drawn from the epigenetic memory of chattel slavery victimization, and the propensity of master’s retaliatory infliction of a violent consequence. This thought has frozen and totally immobilized the overwhelming majority of Black Michigan prison-slaves, not just into inaction, but turning them into advocates of pacified slave-like mentalities. But these niggas are quick to ravage the bodies of other niggas.

To this point, Ori writes

“Balagoon suggests that the primary barrier to the liberation of the colonized was within their minds – a combination of fear of death, respect for state authority, and deference to white power that had been hammered into the population from birth. Liberation would remain an impossibility as long as colonized subjects respected the taboos put in place by their oppressors.”(30)

To be sure, liberation struggles can only be “successful to the extent that we have diminished the element of fear in the minds of black people.”(31) Biko, speaking to this fear as something that erodes the soul of Black people, recognized “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed.”(32)

Secondly, hand-in-hand with our political education must be the material engagement in the first revolution, the inner revolution. This is “The hard painstaking work of changing ourselves into new beings, of loving ourselves and our people, and working with them daily to create a new reality.”(33) This first, inner-revolution consists of “a process of rearranging one’s values – to put it simply, the death of the nigger is the birth of the Black man after coming to grips with being proud to be one’s self.”(34)

The ability to transform oneself from a nigga to an Afrikan man of character is perhaps the most important aspect of developing concordance with a New Afrikan revolutionary collective consciousness. Commenting “On Revolutionary Morality” in 1958, Ho Chi Minh said that “Behavioral habits and traditions are also big enemies: they insidiously hinder the progress of the revolution.” And because niggas, unbeknownst to themselves are white supremacists and pro-capitalist opportunists, the vanguard security apparatus must forever remain on guard for the possibility of niggas in the rank-and-file corrupting the minds of other niggas who have yet to internalize New Afrikan identity.

May these be our lessons. Ori’s Tip of the Spear text is important in the overall lexicon on the history of the prison movement, and must be kept handy next to the collection of Notes From New Afrikan P.O.W and Theoretical Journals. Tip of the Spear should serve not just as reference book, but a corrective guide for the protagonist wrestling the prison movement out the arms of strangulation, blowing spirit into the nostrils of its decaying body until it’s revived, and ready to fight the next round. And We are that body. Let’s dare to do the work.

Forward Towards Liberation!

We Are Our Liberators!

^*Notes: 1. Orisanmi Burton, October 2023, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, University of California Press, p. 223 2. Praveen Jha, Paris Yeros, and Walter Chambati, January 2020, Rethinking the Social Sciences with Sam Moyo, Tulika Books, p.22 3. Mao Zedong, 1937, “On Contradiction”, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung 4. Burton, p.52 5. Burton, p.224-226 6. Life During Wartime, p.6 7. Remembering the Real Dragon - An Interview with George Jackson May 16 and June 29, 1971, Interview by Karen Wald and published in Cages of Steel: The Politics Of Imprisonment In The United States (Edited by Ward Churchill and J.J. Vander Wall). 8. Burton, p.175. 9. Life During Wartime, p.17. 10. Burton, p.1 11. Burton, p.10 12. Huey P. Newton, 1973, Revolutionary Suicide, p.4 13. Steve Biko, I write What I Like, p.150 14. Burton, p.4 15. Burton, p.179 16. Burton, p.175 17. Burton, p.8 18. Burton, p.7 19. Burton, p.150 20. Burton, p.41 21. Burton, p.150 22. Burton, p.99 23. Burton, p.92 24. Burton, p.82 25. Sundiata Acoli, “From The Bowels of the Beast: A Message,” Breaking da Chains. 26. Kwame “Beans” Shakur 27. Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983-1987, p.417 28. Burton, p.105 29. Burton, p.42 30. Burton, p.42 31. Biko, p.145 32. Biko, p.92 33. Safiya Bukhari 34. Burton, p.62

What is to be done? That’s the most important question for a revolutionary. “How can it be done?” is as important. Theory and practice are of equal importance when it comes to revolution. Theory without practice, ideas without action, are useless. Practice without theory leads to failure. That’s why Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels decided that scientific socialism will accomplish what utopian socialism could only dream of. An event such as the Great October Revolution of 1917 required a leader such as Lenin, a philosopher. Now, a revolution is for the people. That’s why we need to educate the people, and to do that we should educate ourselves. Study politics, history, science, psychology, philosophy, but most importantly study revolutionary history and the writings of past and present revolutionaries. It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance. We need well-educated revolutionaries.

The Black Panther Party was committed to educate the people and they required their members to study. They studied Mao, Lenin, Marx, and the works of Black radicals. The Black Panther newspaper was meant “to educate the oppressed”. That was its primary purpose. Che Guevara was a brilliant man who educated people through his speeches in a clear manner. Mao, Lenin, Marx, Engels, they all wrote extensively in order to guide their readers before, during, and after a revolution. Why wouldn’t we take advantage of all that wisdom?

Karl Marx was a philosopher, sociologist, economist and a voracious reader. Lenin too. And they studied the works of different types of radical thinkers. They studied, and admired, the French Revolution. Lenin was a fan of Peter Kropotkin’s history of the French Revolution. Karl Marx admired Charles Darwin’s work, and noticed how Darwin was influenced by Thomas R. Malthus. How can we claim to support scientific forms of socialism and never actually read any science, or economics at least?

I recommend the following: “Quotations From Chairman Mao Zedong” edited by Lin Biao, “Essential Works of Lenin” edited by Henry Christman, “Theories of Surplus Value”, “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, and “The Poverty of Philosophy” by Karl Marx, “The Black Panthers Speak” edited by Philip Foner, and any other books on radical politics, history, science and philosophy.

And remember, comrades: “Hasta la victoria siempre!” -Che Guevara

MIM(Prisons) responds: We welcome this statement from the study group of the Iron Lung Collective, and we support its sentiments. Through our Free Political Books to Prisoners Program, comrades inside can receive any of the books Modern Cassius recommends, with the exception of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong or “The Little Red Book.” We believe all of the historical texts of revolutionaries must be studied and understood in their historical context. The mish-mash of quotes from different periods of the Chinese revolution in “The Little Red Book” make it very difficult to do so.

As we work to re-ignite the prison movement, regular, local study groups are the base of our efforts to re-build. We have a guide for starting a local study group, and a decent stock of revolutionary and historical literature you can find on our literature list. Please see page 2 of ULK for more details on how to participate in the Free Political Books to Prisoners Program.