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.
8 March 2014, Jackson, MS – Today hundreds attended the funeral service
for Mayor Chokwe Lumumba who died after just eight months in office. His
son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, eulogized his father. He has also announced
his plans to run in an April 8 election to replace his father as Mayor
of Jackson.
Days before his death Chokwe was sick with a cold. On 25 February, he
was pronounced dead of “natural causes,” with local officials claiming
it was heart failure. But family requests for an autopsy were denied.
His family is working with the National Caucus of Black Lawyers to fund
an independent autopsy. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam has
offered to put up the money for the autopsy.(1)
Chokwe Lumumba was a leading figure in the struggle for the liberation
of New Afrika since the founding of the Provisional Government of the
Republic of New Afrika in 1968. He went on to launch and work with
organizations such as the New Afrikan Peoples’ Organization and the
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. As a lawyer he fought many historic cases
for New Afrikan humyn rights in the United $tates. He represented Assata
Shakur, Tupac Shakur and the Scott sisters, to name a few.
Many close to Lumumba are questioning his sudden death, following his
election in a state with a long history of murdering New Afrikans. In
our report on his election, we questioned his ability to
build
dual power in Mississippi in line with the New Afrikan Liberation
Movement from within the city government. We pointed out that true dual
power must have an independent base of force from which to defend
itself. Only an independent autopsy can tell whether this was a case of
political assassination, brutally proving that very point. Whatever the
cause of death, it was quite untimely for such a leading national
liberation figure who just won a major election. We will continue to
watch the developments in Jackson where young New Afrikans must prove
themselves as determined as Lumumba and so many others of his generation
who fought for socialism and national independence for New Afrika.
After a year under the elected rule of President Mohamed Morsi, in June
and July the Egyptian people once again took to the streets to protest a
government that was not serving their interests. Back in 2011 the
Egyptian people successfully took down Hosni Mubarak and forced the
country’s first elections for President. As we wrote at that time in
ULK
19: “The Egyptian people forced President Mubarak out of the
country, but accepted his replacement with the Supreme Council of the
Military – essentially one military dictatorship was replaced by
another. One of the key members of this Council is [Omar] Sueliman, the
CIA point man in the country and head of the Egyptian general
intelligence service. He ran secret prisons for the United $tates and
persynally participated in the torturing of those prisoners.” But the
Egyptian people were not fooled, and they rightfully took to the streets
to force further change this summer. Still, we do not see clear
proletarian leadership of the protests, and instead the U.$.-funded
military is again stepping in to claim the mantle and pretend to
represent the people.
Morsi is widely considered “Egypt’s first democratically elected
president.” Prior to the elections in 2012 the country was led by an
elected parliament and an unelected President, Hosni Mubarak, a former
general who took power after the assassination of his predecessor in
1981. But it’s important to consider what “democratically elected”
really means. Democratic elections presume that the people in a country
have the ability to participate freely, without coercion, and that all
candidates have equal access to the voting population. Most elections in
the world today do not actually represent democracy. In many countries
dominated by Amerikan imperialism, there are elections, but we do not
call these democratic, because it is not possible for candidates without
lots of money and the backing of one imperialist interest or another to
win. When democracy gets out of imperialist control and an
anti-imperialist candidate does participate and win, they better have
military power to back them up or they will be quickly murdered or
removed by military force (see
“Allende
in Chile” or
“Lumumba
in the Congo”). We should not just assume that people participating
in a balloting exercise represents democracy for the people.
There are some key political reasons why Morsi won the presidential
election in 2012. Representing the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi was well
educated and spent several years getting a doctorate in the United
$tates and teaching at University in the 1980s. He is certainly not one
of the 40% of the Egyptian population living on less than $2 a day.(1)
The Muslim Brotherhood has long been a well organized activist group,
which despite being banned by the government from participating in
Parliamentary elections was allowed to organize on the streets as a
counterforce to progressive anti-imperialist parties that faced complete
repression.(2) Demonstrating the advantage it had over other banned
organizations, the Muslim Brotherhood put together the most effective
electoral campaign after Mubarak fell. It is telling that the runoff in
the presidential election was between Morsi and Ahmed Shafiz, the prime
minister under Hosni Mubarak, and the vote was close. Essentially the
election was between a representative of the status quo that had just
been overthrown, and a candidate who promised to be different but
represented a conservative religious organization.
The military has once again stepped in to the vacuum created by the mass
protests demanding the removal of President Morsi, pretending to be
defending the interests of the people. This position by the military is
no surprise after Morsi, in August, stripped the military of any say in
legislation and dismissed his defense minister. The military selected
the leader of the Supreme Constitutional Court to serve as interim
president after Morsi stepped down. Morsi still enjoys significant
support among the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt who continue to take to
the streets to demand that he be freed from military prison and returned
to power.
The Egyptian military actually has a long history of institutional
power. In 1981, after Mubarak took power, the military expanded with the
help of Amerikan aid. This aid came as a sort of bribe, as up until the
1977 peace accord Egypt had been attempting to lead an Arab resistance
to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, a cause the people of Egypt
continue to support to this day. Since then the military has remained
one of the top receivers of U.$. military aid, second only to Israel
itself, until 2001 when Afghanistan became the largest. The armed forces
in Egypt used this economic power to take up significant economic
endeavors entering into private business with factories, hotels and
valuable real estate.(3) It is clever leadership that allows the
military to divorce itself from failed leadership of Egypt time and
again while acting behind the scenes to ensure that only those
individuals they support, who will carry out their will, gain the
presidency. This is not a democracy. And the leadership of the armed
forces will continue to serve their Amerikan masters, not the will of
the people, as General el-Sisi is once again claiming.
MIM(Prisons) supports the interests of the masses of Egyptian people as
they ally with the interests of the world’s majority who are exploited
by imperialism. We praise their ongoing activism in taking to the
streets when the government is not meeting their needs. But we can learn
from history that deposing one figurehead does not make for
revolutionary change. Fundamental change will require an overthrow of
the entire political institution in Egypt that is dependent on U.$.
imperialism. And while President Nasser offered an independent road for
Egypt during the anti-colonial era following WWII, true independence
requires the full mobilization and participation of the masses in
creating a new system based on need and not profit.
It is a truth in humyn history that those with the guns and power will
not voluntarily step aside, but they will make cosmetic changes to try
to fool the masses into complacency. We call on the Egyptian people, who
have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to sacrifice for the
movement, not to be fooled and not to allow electoral politics to drain
their momentum. The military is not on your side, and neither are any of
the branches of the existing government. Seize the power you have
demonstrated in the streets and build for fundamental, revolutionary
change to a government that actually serves the people and not the
elite.
Chokwe Lumumba – lawyer, activist, Vice President of the Republic of New
Afrika, and cofounder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) – was
elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi on 4 June 2013 with 87% of the
votes. Accounting for 80% of the population, Jackson is the second
Blackest city in the United $tates. Mississippi is the Blackest state
with 35% of its voters being New Afrikan.(1)
Even though the rate of white voter turnout was more than twice that of
New Afrikans, and some 90% of whites supported the other guy, Lumumba
came out victorious.(1) All of these facts support the decision of the
MXGM to focus on building a base of power within New Afrika in Jackson,
Mississippi. However, elections themselves cannot be a tool for
liberation or independence, and the only cases where MIM(Prisons) might
promote them would be for tactical victories. This election was part of
a strategic plan that MXGM released almost a year ago.
This plan states:
“The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) firmly believes that at this
stage in the struggle for Black Liberation that the movement must be
firmly committed to building and exercising what we have come to regard
as ‘dual power’ – building autonomous power outside of the realm of the
state (i.e. the government) in the form of People’s Assemblies and
engaging electoral politics on a limited scale with the express intent
of building radical voting blocks and electing candidates drawn from the
ranks of the Assemblies themselves.”(2)
The idea of the oppressed nations building organizations that are
independent of and not funded by the state can be a controversial issue
in this country. While there is nothing illegal or inherently
threatening about organizing independent from the state, Amerikans rely
on repression in order to prevent the self-determination of the
oppressed nations. If the oppressed nations are to break free from
imperialism’s choke hold, it will threaten the luxurious lifestyles of
the average Joe the plumber who lives off the wealth of oppressed
nations abroad. We saw one example of this mentality among Amerikans
when recent issues of Under Lock & Key were censored in
North Carolina specifically citing as the justification the fifth point
of the United Front for Peace in Prisons – Independence.
While “independence” is a fairly broad term used to define a thing in
relation to another thing, “dual power” has a much more specific meaning
to Marxists. Independence on its own does not constitute the
establishment of “dual power.” When MXGM uses the term “dual power” they
appear to really be talking about parallel strategies of community
organizing and electoral politics.
The condition of dual power actually exists when there is an emerging
state coming up against an existent, and dying state. This, of course,
is the product of class struggle, the motive force of history. In
discussing Engels’ ideas in defining what state power is, Lenin wrote:
“What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies
of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command. … A standing army
and police are the chief instruments of state power.”(3)
Dual, of course meaning two, would imply that you would have two
different political structures with their own police, army and prisons,
etc. in order to have dual power. Such a situation would mean that a
civil war had begun. When Lenin first coined the term in 1917 he was
speaking of the emerging Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies that
would seize state power later that same year.(4) Certainly this is not
the condition in Mississippi today.
MXGM recognizes their electoral efforts are limited, and considers them
one pillar of their strategy of building political power in the region
that is separate from their work to build autonomous structures
(People’s Assemblies).(2) But these People’s Assemblies are not parallel
to the Soviets in 1917 or the liberated zones in China in 1948 or even
the countless regions in the world today where power is held by emerging
states (see Palestine, India, Colombia, the Philippines, etc).
Within the context of oppressed nation territory, there is an argument
to be made for engaging in electoral politics as a step towards building
one’s base. While the Lumumba campaign has a clear connection to
revolutionary nationalism, it is not based in proletarian ideology.
Revolutionary nationalism can come in different class forms. The lack of
proletarian ideology leads them to succumb to populism. Populism
threatens New Afrikan independence because of the economic pull of U.$.
imperialism. With “economic development” as part of his political
platform, it seems hard for Lumumba to avoid playing the role of bribing
his own people with superprofits won from imperialism. This is one
reason it is hard to justify supporting electoral work except to make
tactical gains.
The MXGM economic program, the “third pillar” of their Jackson Plan,
focuses on cooperative economics and building green economies. Such a
strategy does not confront the structure of capitalism, but is a
concession to petty bourgeois idealism. As long as capitalism exists
people are either exploited or exploiters, so all efforts should be on
exposing the need to end that system rather than white-washing it with
co-ops and eco-friendly operations. There is no example in history of
building new economic systems that effectively challenged capitalism
without first establishing true dual power. Therefore if dual power is
not feasible in our conditions, these economic strategies become
reformist at best. We are better off struggling to maintain our
political independence at this stage.
While running for and being elected Mayor limits Chokwe Lumumba
politically, the public release of the Jackson-Kush Plan a year prior
means that his landslide victory represents a majority of New Afrikans
in Jackson who are at least open to the idea that political independence
from Amerika is in the interests of their nation. Establishing that fact
in the eyes of the New Afrikan masses is one small victory on the road
to New Afrikan liberation. But electoral politics are a feeble bridge.
The more people rely on it to reach liberation, the sooner it will fall
out beneath them. Unless the bridge is strengthened with correct
revolutionary theory, it will be doomed to leave the New Afrikan masses
on the wrong side of history.
Lots of attention is being given to counting prisoners in the political
arena, why?
Because census counts add prisoner population numbers to the community
where the prison is located, more and more incarcerated inner city
residents are being used to strengthen the economically weak areas of
rural Amerika. More prisoners means more jobs, more government money and
more political power.
Prisons, which were once eschewed have become a boom for many small
towns. Cheap land and willing residents make these isolated communities
the perfect location for this country’s growing number of human
warehouses.
Census numbers determine such things as highway funding, fire stations,
hospitals, medicaid, foster care, rehab-services, schools and parks just
to name a few. Most of these benefits will never be seen by prisoners.
Prisoners are a lucrative commodity in the census game.
State officials are quick to cite the benefits of prisons in
economically depressed communities. Government aid, indigent medical
care, energy assistance, and revenue sharing are just a few of the
selling points.
The majority of the nation’s prison population is either Black or
Latino. Locating these unwilling residents in a small, predominantly
white towns fundamentally shifts the balance of political power through
the redistricting process. It is not just federal money that follows us
out of our community, it is political power as well.
MIM(Prisons) adds: This prison-based gerrymandering is a problem
that has been extensively documented by the
Prison Policy
Institute who explain: “The Bureau counts incarcerated people as
residents of the towns where they are confined, though they are barred
from voting in 48 states and return to their homes after being released.
The practice also defies most state constitutions and statutes, which
explicitly state that incarceration does not change a residence.”
Unlike the PPI, we don’t prioritize the fight to change the Census
Bureau policies. The push for reform is insidious in the implication
that we can improve capitalist democracy to make elections and
government programs actually serve the people. But this is a good
example of the hidden forms of white power that are executed through the
state to this day in 2013. While oppressed nations are
disproportionately disenfranchised of the vote in Amerikan democracy,
white communities use these prisoners to skew financial resources away
from the oppressed nations to themselves. This, of course, is only
possible because of national oppression earlier on in the process where
law enforcement targets oppressed nation communities, while drug use in
white communities goes on with little interference. Such types of
oppression and manipulation are inherent in a capitalist system.
The president, commander-in-chief of the greatest empire on earth, the
U$A, gave the yearly “state of the union” on February 12, 2013, as
required by the U.$. constitution.
Funny thing is that while I sit in prison and know first hand that what
he says is crap, I couldn’t help laughing at the contradictions in his
speech. Let’s start off with this: “…kept the promises we made.” Well,
let’s go to the obvious and talk how the U.$. broke most, actually all,
of its treaties with the First Nations. They promised them a specific
amount of land and agreed to leave them alone. But then the U.$. took
more land thereby shrinking the “Reservations.”
The pre$ident said this is the “greatest nation on earth.” Third World
nations and oppressed nations within the U.$. know this is BS. This
nation was founded on genocide and continues its tradition of
destruction and death with wars in the Middle East. Keep an eye out for
the United $tates’s next deployment of aggression and occupation on
other nations or, as they say “humanitarian missions.”
Obama talked about “Peoples’ government.” As a settler nation, this
Euro-Amerikan population has no legitimacy to rule, govern or even be on
this continent. This is not a government for all people, but a select
few who rule over the rest, while buying off most Amerikans to
complicity (i.e. the labor aristocracy).
Obama spoke about “respect[ing] the fundamental rights of people.” If
the United $tates had an ounce of respect for rights they wouldn’t have
the largest percentage of its population in prison of any country in the
world; 2.3 million locked away, most Latino and Black. Singling out
certain nationalities for imprisonment is not respect, but oppression.
If the United $tates respected fundamental rights of people why did it
invade Iraq? No proof of weapons of mass destruction were found. Why
does it sanction torture? Why is the white nation in Amerika better off
than the oppressed nations, not to mention Third World nations?
Finally Obama talked about “fundamental rights of democracy [and] the
right to vote.” He never mentioned anything about prisoners and how they
can’t vote. This is a clear example of a deliberate policy of outcasting
certain people.
Obama’s speech offers lip service to the ideas of equality and
representative government, possibly tricking the colonized into thinking
there is some hope of making this democracy work for them. But Amerika
remains an imperialist nation whose wealth is built on the exploitation
of the Third World peoples. Those who sweat and die to supply the cushy
lives of Amerikan citizens do not get a vote in this “democracy.”
In the shadow of the recent presidential election, MIM(Prisons) takes
this opportunity to explain some of the many reasons we don’t
participate in elections under capitalism. We reiterate the MIM slogan:
Don’t
Vote, Organize!
Granted, communists might participate in local elections when they find
an opportunity to make change that will better facilitate their
organizing work and goals, but these instances are few and far between.
Consider someone running for City Council proposing to facilitate the
distribution of free literature and posters in a city, while their
opponent wants to outlaw the distribution of communist literature. We
might join this battle on the side of the free speech advocate because
it is very important that we have the opportunity to organize and
educate people. Because the legal power of a City Council is pretty
limited, these battles tend to be clear cut and we can support one
candidate without jumping on the imperialist bandwagon.
In contrast, Congress and the President are fundamentally reactionary
just by nature of their role in the capitalist system. It is their job
to support and promote imperialist policies of global aggression.
Sure, there may be surface differences between imperialist candidates.
One might deny the existence of global warming while the other offers
platitudes about how we need to help the environment, but neither can
significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions because doing so threatens
the profit system. Or one might advocate shipping all migrants back
home, while the other wants to grant green cards to people already in
the United $tates. That’s something with a real immediate impact on the
lives of the oppressed. But the U.$. has a long history of bringing in
migrant labor and the kicking them out, particularly from Mexico. And
ultimately, both of these candidates will have to support enforcing the
imperialist borders, and exploiting cheap Mexican labor.
Even if we try to explain that we are only picking a candidate based on
their position on one question, how do we justify giving support to
someone who backs the existence of the prison system that locks up the
most people per capita in the world? Or someone who supports invading
Third World countries to ensure their puppet regimes are friendly to
Amerikan capitalist interests?
There is no real choice under imperialism. The majority of the world’s
people suffer under the rule of Amerikan imperialism, but they don’t get
a vote in the elections. Amerika has streamlined the elections to just
two parties, with very minimal differences between them. And the
majority of the Amerikan people, bought off with imperialist
superprofits given to them as a birthright, are perfectly fine with
these “choices.” Both candidates represent the material interests of
Amerikan citizens. It is the imperialist system that ensures sufficient
superprofits from exploitation of Third World people to keep the First
World citizens so well off.
The election of President Obama four years ago should have been the best
possible lesson for “anti-war” Amerikans. Many so-called progressives
got behind the Obama campaign, excited to finally have a Black man in
power, and believing the minimally progressive rhetoric they heard from
Obama. But putting a Black face on imperialism didn’t change
imperialism. Before Obama was elected we
wrote
about his campaign as a good representative of imperialism in
ULK 3. Under Obama, Amerika has continued its role as global
oppressor, invading Third World countries to install or support
U.$.-friendly governments, enforcing strict imperialist borders at home
to keep out the oppressed, and maintaining the largest per capita prison
population in the world.
The State of Puerto Rico
While we didn’t campaign around any electoral politics this year, nor
vote, the results can be interesting to us as the largest scale polling
of the Amerikan population and its internal semi-colonies. While the
exploited people of the world did not get to vote for the President of
the Empire, historically oppressed nations with U.$. citizenship did. As
we work to expand our analysis of the internal semi-colonies’
relationships to imperialism, we can look at elections as a relative, if
not absolute, measure of assimilation. The most explicit example of this
came in the 2012 plebiscite on the status of Puerto Rico among Boricua
voters.
While inconsistencies in the format of previous plebiscites make it hard
to decipher trends with a cursory assessment, it does appear that a
majority rejected the current commonwealth status of Puerto Rico for the
first time. The government is counting the statehood option as the
victor with a 61% majority of those choosing an alternative to the
commonwealth status. But really, only 48% of those who voted chose
statehood, with 26% of voters choosing sovereign free association and 4%
choosing independence.(1) About 22% didn’t select a new status. Since
46% voted to remain a commonwealth, it seems that many of them chose a
new status as their second choice. Originally the two votes were to
occur separately, which would make interpretation of the results easier.
The option of “sovereign free association” was new in this plebiscite,
and seems to reflect the more bourgeois nationalist among the
neo-colonialists. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want
more freedom to act independent of the U.$. while keeping the financial
benefits of U.$. social services that they receive today as a
commonwealth.
The 2012 plebiscite did have the largest turnout yet, with 79%
participation.(2) This adds a little more weight to the small shift from
a plurality favoring commonwealth to a plurality (at least) favoring
statehood. At the time of the last plebiscite, in 1998, MIM reported
strong assimilationism among the Boricua population due to economic
interests tied to accessing the superprofits obtained by the U.$. from
the Third World.(3) While MIM never believed that the meager 2-5% vote
for independence was genuinely representative of the Boricua people,
neither is true self-determination on the immediate horizon despite
nationalist rhetoric from many political parties. A survey of the
desires of Boricuas for self-determination is not valid until real
self-determination is actually an option on the table. Unfortunately
real self-determination won’t be possible until Boricuas are organized
against Amerika and its lackey leadership in their homeland.
Some have hypothesized that the economic downturn helped increase the
statehood vote as Boricuas felt the crunch and wanted closer economic
integration into the United $tates. This makes economic sense. So it’ll
take much more extreme crisis before economic demands become
revolutionary for the internal semi-colonies of the United $tates.
Chicanos and New Afrikans Vote
Trends in Black voter participation in the last two presidential
elections indicate that the neo-colonial effect is real as Blacks have
come out at higher rates, with Black youth being the most active voter
participants. While Latinos were also brought out by Obama in the last
two elections, Latino youth voting and “civic engagement” has lagged
behind Black and white youth, yet they were twice as likely to
participate in a protest than their counterparts of other nations
according to a 2008 report.(4) In 2008, Black voters closed the gap with
white voter participation, which averaged around 10% in the previous
five presidential elections. This year, Obama brought similar rates of
Blacks to the polls. In the same period, Latinos and Asians have
diverged from Blacks in their voter participation, who they have
historically lagged behind already.(5) For Latinos this divergence
corresponds to an increase in the percentage of people who are not
citizens, and therefore can’t vote. We do not have data showing whether
the same is true for Asians. While the non-participation may be
enforced, rather than by choice, the Pew Hispanic Center also found in a
recent survey that most Latinos identify with their family’s country of
origin and not as Amerikans.(6) There is little doubt that the vast
majority of Blacks identify as Amerikan. The connections that Latinos
and Asians have to the Third World are a significant factor in their
political consciousness and how they perceive the United $tates, their
relationship to it, and their participation in it.
Prison Reform?
Similar to supporting someone for City Council, discussed above,
propositions are another relatively clear-cut realm of elections where
we may organize around a particular issue. To look at more concrete
examples of how this usually plays out, we turn to two propositions this
year that addressed California’s prison population: Propositions 34 and
36. Proposition 34 was presented to abolish the death penalty, which
sounds great at first. But in this case, death row prisoners actually
recognized that the law was opposed to their interests in that it would
prevent them from proving their innocence in court. They launched an
active campaign to oppose Prop. 34 and it did fail. The weakness of the
proposition was inherent to the limitations in the system to address
justice in a real way.
Proposition 36 is a reform to the Three Strikes law, and it passed.
MIM(Prisons) welcomes the prospect of less people going to prison in
California, and supposedly even current prisoners being released
earlier. Yet, Three Strikes itself still exists. The reform will right a
few egregious wrongs, but leaves Three Strikes, not to mention the whole
criminal injustice system, in place. Even abolishing Three Strikes
altogether would be merely a quantitative change in the oppression meted
out by the injustice system, without changing the substance of it at
all. Prop. 36 was promoted by those who want to reduce state spending on
prisons, and clearly promoted the use of Three Strikes for the majority
of prisoners it has been applied to. To campaign for Prop. 36 was to
promote this position or to say that this is the best we can hope for.
It did not serve the interests of the prisoner class as a whole, but
threw some carrots to a few.
Since there are only so many hours in the day, to spend them on
organizing around these small changes means slightly less suffering in
the short term, and much more suffering in the long term as imperialism
marches on unchallenged. Reforms do play an important role while
organizing in our current conditions, but we choose which reforms to
support very carefully, weighing how they impact our organizing efforts
against imperialism, what class interests they serve, and how they
relate to real conditions on the ground.
Electoral Politics and Strategy
Our line is that imperialism cannot be reformed. Our strategy is to
build institutions of the oppressed which are separate from imperialism
in order to build up our own power, while agitating around issues that
highlight the horrors of the imperialist system that exists. At times
campaigning around an electoral campaign could be a useful tactic in
that strategy. But strategically we are not trying to get elected in a
popularity contest, or be on the winning team. We are struggling for
liberation and an end to all oppression!
As M-1 of dead prez put it on Block Report Radio the morning after the
recent “presidential selection”: “I’m not thinking about today. And I’m
not thinking about four years from now. And I’m not thinking about
smoking marijuana. I’m thinking about 50 years from now being able to be
the self-determining people who are raising a nation that’s based in
stability.” Spoken like a true revolutionary, this is the type of
thinking that we promote to develop an anti-imperialist political pole
within the belly of the beast.
Telling people to vote for one imperialist candidate over another is
suggesting that we can make significant change by working within the
system. As we already explained, the scale of the election and the scale
of the change is key: for a local city election the impact is much lower
and our opportunity to actually explain to people why a particular local
law is important to communist goals is much greater. But in a national
election, telling people to support a candidate who is fundamentally
pro-imperialist, both in words and deeds, is misleading.
Every four years Amerikans are given an opportunity to vote for a
new representative to lead the country as president or re-elect the one
who already holds office. This year Amerikans have two options on who to
elect, either Obama or Mitt Romney. Weighing the options, who is it that
will more likely bring change for the oppressed? In this case it’s
neither, both Obama and Romney are imperialist representatives and both
share the primary concern of how to better serve the interests of
capitalism/imperialism. So why should U.$. citizens vote for one
oppressor over another? The answer is simple, they shouldn’t!
The oppressor class will always sell high dreams and prospective futures
to the oppressed to gain their vote. For instance Obama and the
Democratic Party only recently proposed “Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals” (DACA). DACA pretends to offer non-citizens who arrived in the
U.$. as children the opportunity for legal residence. But lets look at
it for what it is. DACA is not actually a law but an executive order
that can be revoked at any time by whoever is president. The
qualifications for DACA are narrow and for those qualified they will
only receive a temporary work permit. What about the others who applied
and were rejected for one reason or another? Well they willingly gave up
their information along with that of their families and will now be in
the “ICE database” and could be rounded up and deported. It is a
re-election tactic the Obama administration utilized as a ploy to get
the Latino vote. But this is not in the interests of the
undocumented.
“People always were and always will be the foolish victims of deceit and
self-deceit in politics until they learn to discover the interests of
some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social
phrases declarations and promises. The supporters of reforms and
improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order
until they realize that every old institution, however barbarous and
rotten it may appear to be, is maintained by the forces of some ruling
class and there is only one way of smashing the resistance of these
classes and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, and
to enlighten and organize for the struggle the forces which can - and
owing to their social positions must - constitute the power capable of
sweeping away the old and creating the new.” - VI Lenin On the Three
Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism
The electoral system is not nor will it ever be the means to bringing
real change, as long as there is an imperialist as president there will
be no progress for the oppressed. There are those who say Obama is a
better choice than Romney because Romney is a racist Mormon and his
extreme conservative policies will bring further devastation to Amerika
or wage more wars. But weren’t these the sentiments towards the end of
the Bush administration? People got fed up with Bush’s deportation of
immigrants and warmongering agenda. They had hope in the first Black
president. But we have seen Obama has gone farther than Bush in
violating people’s fundamental rights in “the war on terrorism.” His
2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) law gives the president
full authority to detain anyone who the government deems a terrorist
indefinitely, without charges or a trial, and the terrorist label can be
vague and will more than likely be thrown around like candy.
Obama has deported more immigrants than Bush, he also ordered more drone
strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan than Bush. Obama’s
warmongering resulted in 284 drone strikes on Pakistan alone. And under
Obama’s leadership the United $tates., along with Israel, threatens
imminent war on Iran. Let’s face reality, Obama and Romney will only
serve the interests of the big bourgeoisie and maintain the status quo.
As prisoners we need to consciously participate in politics that serve
our interests. In ULK 28 someone mentioned the
penal
system in Nevada; a prisoner anticipated reprisals by fellow
prisoners for exposing the warden for culinary and laundry violations to
the health department. These prisoners acting on behalf of the prison
administration to attack this prisoner is counter and reactionary to
what he was trying to do by bettering the quality of food and laundry
for the prison population. This goes to show what
Mao
Zedong once said about lumpen: “brave fighters but apt to be
destructive. They can become a revolutionary force if given proper
guidance.” We all know doing favors for the pigs like that mentioned
above is going a little too far and would merit a negative reaction from
the prison population.
Looking at it from a bigger picture, under Obama/Romney mass
incarcerations will continue. The U.$. has the highest incarceration
rate in the world today and let’s not forget the police brutality that
has swelled across the country since Obama’s been in the office.
Our action of not voting for one oppressor over another should be
consciously voiced. When I explained this to a fellow prisoner he
responded: “well who else is going to be your representative
nationally?” My answer to that was simple: “we can represent ourselves,
we don’t need yankee representatives!” The oppressed nationalities need
their own independent representatives who will serve their interests,
not sell them out, and institutions that help them rather than strip
them of their identity and culture. Reforms or amendments will never
bring about genuine change for the oppressed nations, only communism
will.
MIM(Prisons) responds: The author above originally quoted Karl
Marx as saying:
“Every few years the oppressed are authorized to decide which members of
the oppressor class will represent and crush them in parliament.”
However, this does not accurately represent the conditions in the United
$tates where the oppressor nation has the majority say in who represents
the government that oppresses and kills more people worldwide than any
other country [UPDATE: white Amerikans ended up being 72% of the voters
in the 2012 national election]. The people most oppressed by U.$.
imperialism have no say in these elections that affect them very deeply.
Rather than encouraging prisoners to organize in their own interests, we
challenge them to think more broadly, in the interests of the oppressed
people of the world. This is important because the imperialist system
has stolen tremendous wealth and brought it home to Amerika where all
the citizens share in the spoils. While prisoners are clearly oppressed,
they share in the Amerikan mentality of looking out for their own wealth
at the expense of the world’s people.
San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro promotes Chicano assimilation into
Amerikkka
On September 4, 2012 the Democratic convention was held, almost every TV
channel was broadcasting this. Like the Republican convention, the
Democrats had speakers come out to make a short speech on why you should
vote for their candidate. These conventions are a classic ‘good cop, bad
cop’ game meant to hoodwink the oppressed.
This year’s democratic keynote speaker at the convention was Julian
Castro the mayor of San Antonio, Texas. Castro is running for congress
and is seen as an up and coming Democrat. Although he merely adds to the
rest of the numerous defenders of imperialism, what is different and
thus dangerous about someone like Castro is that he is a Chicano
bourgeois politician who is now being propped up to fool the Brown
masses, just as Obama was used against the Black masses.
Castro’s background is similar to many Chicanos today. His grandmother
migrated to the United $tates in the first wave of migration after the
Mexican Revolution in 1920. His mother was born in Texas and was
actively a part of the Chicano movement of the 60s and 70s. As a first
generation college student she joined the Raza Unida Party (RUP) and
became one of its leaders.
La Raza Unida Party came about from the leadership of Crusade for
Justice another Chicano organization of that time. It was in 1970 that
Corky Gonzalez announced the formation of RUP. The Crusade for Justice
was actively leading many Chicano struggles of this time period. At one
point as Acuña described, “The Crusade for Justice leadership also
wanted to form the ‘Congress de Aztlan’, which would build a Chicano
nation.”(1) The RUP meant to uplift the Raza’s consciousness, take
community control of social services in the Barrios, taking control of
schools and development (building homes, parks, etc.) which all seems
cool and “progressive.” But without completely breaking with the
oppressors politics these efforts were simply spinning wheels, like
trying to ride a bike with no chain; you can turn the pedals all you
want but the bike stays in the same spot.
The RUP had a left wing and a right wing, like all phenomenon there were
internal contradictions that pulled this group in different directions,
and without a clear path for liberation RUP was doomed from the
beginning. The biggest error in RUP’s program was in attempting to work
within the framework of Amerikan bourgeois politics. RUP naively thought
Amerika would stand by and allow a historically oppressed people, an
internal semi-colony, to build a political party in the barrios, even
though it attempted to do so within Amerika’s political system. The
state would not allow this, as organizing the oppressed for any
progressive political activity poses a real potential threat. Once
organized and educated this force can easily make a leap from working
within the current system to working against the system. This is why
people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were assassinated even
though they were not calling for socialism and pretty much worked within
the confines of the Amerikan laws. They still had influence and the
potential was too much, the threat assessment told the state what must
be done.
RUP was heavily surveilled by the CIA (1) and so all the Cointelpro
tactics were used to destroy this party. And ultimately RUP suffered
from believing Chicanos could be liberated via Amerika’s bourgeois
politics or through reforms. The fault also lies in those more
revolutionary elements within RUP for not steering RUP on a more
revolutionary approach that sought the liberation of the Chicano nation
by building for a socialist revolution on these shores.
So this is where Julian Castro comes from and thus this bourgeois
nationalism is what shaped his ideas and lead him down the road to Brown
capitalism or outright defender of imperialism. His assimilationist
stance shined forth in his speech with statements like “[we need to] do
our part as one community, as one United States of Amerika.” This is
typical language of a comprador who’s job is to bring the other
oppressed into the fold of the oppressor. His/her job is always to quell
or smother the burning embers of resistance in a people and keep things
as they are. The slave of old who lived in the massa’s house would go
out to the slave shacks and talk about how good the massa is, how good
the slaves got it, maybe even given them a piece of bacon or the good
meat with a promise for more so long as they hang on and be content or
say some prayers. This is the approach Castro took in his speech, his
focus - like the rest of the Democrats was on the “middle class,” and at
one point his petit bourgeois colors intensified as he yelled: “The
middle class the engine of our economic growth!” The Brown bourgeoisie
must have soiled themselves with excitement at hearing this parasite
babble on.
Castro’s interests are stripped of the more progressive aspects of 1970s
political line of his mother, Rosie Castro, which he branded as outdated
in an interview on Pacifica Radio. As misguided as the RUP may have been
in their approach, they never spoke of leaving Raza behind, nor were
they reduced to telling Raza to ‘Pull themselves up by the bootstraps.’
Rather they sought to include even the poorest Raza living in shacks and
fought to better their conditions while Julian Castro has aligned with
imperialism as he stated: “we know in our free market economy some
people will prosper more than others.” The idea that in a society there
will be the haves and the have nots is not something we can accept. But
Castro sends the message to the ruling class that he is okay with this
and thus is not intending to threaten or challenge this status quo. This
buys his seat in the imperialist shuttle of Amerikan politics.
The use of Julian Castro is just the latest attempt to get Chicanos and
other Raza to become part of Amerika. But many Raza still remember the
oppression we have faced, it is still too much for many to side with the
enemy. According to the 2010 U.S. Census about 2.3 million businesses
are owned by Latinos. Yet when it comes to voting in bourgeois elections
only 60 percent of adult Latino citizens vote compared to 70 percent of
Black adults who vote and 74 percent of whites who vote. At the same
time approximately 500,000 Latino youth will turn 18 every year for the
next 20 years. So I believe Julian Castro is the tip of the iceberg
where Amerika will begin courting Latinos much more than they ever have
in history, and not just any Latinos but preferably those with family
history of activism as Julian Castro and his mother in an attempt to
paint these parasites as “legitimate” in the eyes of the Chicano nation.
But these Brown faces in high places will never be legitimate so long as
they support the super parasites. Those who we see as legitimate are
those working to liberate our nation, those working to neutralize the
super parasite.
We see Amerika’s open repression reaching fascist proportions in Aztlán,
especially in prisons and on the “border.” Most recently we saw along
the Texas/Mexico “border” the U.$. instillation of a “mini navy” (4)
where speed boats with high powered weapons are guarding the Rio Bravo
and have recently baptized these new boats in Mexicano blood when they
shot and killed a Mexican citizen on the Mexican side who was barbecuing
in a picnic area with his family right on the river. Footage on the
Amerikan corporate media this week shows families and children as the
border patrol speeds off while cries erupt in this park. This open war
on Raza comes without a peep from bourgeois politicians like Julian
Castro, who, rather than condemn this repression in his speech, instead
declares “Amerika will prevail” in his speech to massa.
We must also learn from the lessons of the past. We are not free to
create our own political parties that struggle for our nations, look at
what happened to the RUP and Panthers and others. In Amerika although
parties of the internal semi-colonies are not publicly banned, they are
certainly banned behind closed doors in Langly, in Washington DC, and
their other hideaways. We know this is true when we learn about
Cointelpro and other operations to infiltrate and disrupt peoples
parties or groups. And so we refuse to be fed snake oil from the
imperialists or their allies and hasten the day when Aztlán and the
other internal semi-colonies can be liberated from attacks by Amerika!
I recently read ULK issue 6 in which a comrade out of
California
discussed
his experiences after the
election
of Obama. This brought back memories I experienced along the same
lines, where at the moment it was announced that Obama was indeed the
new president there was a roar of applause almost as if one were in a
football stadium and your team just scored a touch down! This was in one
of California’s security housing units (SHUs) so this jubilation was
coming from prisoners who are amongst the most “conscious”, the most
progressive, who are taken off the mainline for rebellious acts against
the state. It was a sad sight to see potentially revolutionary prisoners
get sucked into the age-old game of bourgeois politics.
I remember having a long beat with my neighbor at the time over the
Obama sham and how Obama is like a Booker T. Washington, only worse.
Booker T. Washington was used to pacify the Black masses for the
Amerikan government but had no power outside the Black nation, whereas
Obama is the Commander in Chief and has much more power than Booker T.
Yet, like Booker T., Obama is used to corral the Black nation and many
others into the realm of bourgeois politics. On the doorstep of
imperialism, Obama’s presence in the White House is used to “legitimize”
the program of Amerika and the actions of the oppressor nation, and to
sweeten the bitter pill of repression for the oppressed nations to
swallow more quickly.
The upcoming elections have the imperialists once more dressing up
Obama, having him show up for a photo shoot at an all-Black Baptist
church, at a press conference for Latino rights, etc. But I’ll make this
real clear real fast - Obama is an imperialist and does not care about
the Black nation. Latinos have learned from Obama being in office. Many
Latinos were sucked into bourgeois politics, standing for hours in lines
beside Black folks and voting for Obama. Now what do they have to show
for it? They have over one million Latinos who had their asses deported!
Over one million - that’s more Latinos deported with Obama as president
than with Bush II as president!
Obama and the Democrats feel Latinos have no choice but to support them
because of the Republicans being so outspokenly anti-migrant, but this
is wrong! Both are anti-migrant and only tolerate migrants when we are
picking their baby spinach and heirloom tomatoes, or when we are
cleaning their homes, watching their kids and washing their cars. They
tolerate La Raza, the people, when it saves them a dollar. They let us
work and then a day before pay day they call Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) on us as happened in the processing plants in the last
couple years. It’s an old con game that both the Republicans and
Democrats use to bamboozle Raza and save a buck in the process. This is
a rerun that the Chicano nation has been battling in Aztlán since 1848
and will continue until we liberate Aztlán.
Our liberation will not come from the Democrats or Republicans; it will
not even come from any other party in the Amerikan bourgeois political
elections. The imperialists will never permit Aztlán to be liberated. It
will fight tooth and nail and sabotage any ballot box initiative even
hinting about this and neutralize any leaders who built momentum to
build any ballot box initiative in this direction. Our liberation will
come from the Chicano movement and its struggles outside of bourgeois
politics.
I am beginning to hear the same old tired talk about Obama again since
the elections are coming up. I heard one Chicano talking about how he
wrote his family and told them to vote for Obama so that the Raza will
be better off than they would be with a racist Republican. So I got on
the tier and asked him “what the hell has Obama or any Democrat during
his term done for Raza?!” He had no answer as I figured so I explained
how Raza has even suffered more with the Democrats but that they are in
fact one and the same; a double-headed monster, a single beast.
The problem is many prisoners who initially take an interest in
political science will watch these imperialist propaganda shows on the
corporate TV stations and begin to parrot what they hear and swear up
and down its true because they heard it on the “news.” What they are not
grasping is this “news” is controlled by the imperialists. They will not
put out views that work contrary to their program, they will not inform
us on revolutionary news and analysis, and they will not educate us to
rise up as these news corporations are owned by billionaires who protect
their bread and butter like a revolutionary protects his/her people.
This is why we did not hear much when, on June 7th 2010, the U.$. border
patrol shot and killed a 14-year-old Mexican child named Sergio
Hernandez as he played on the Mexican side of a canal. This is why the
killing of Oscar Grant didn’t get proper coverage. Yet we see the same
actions played over and over on TV when it’s a country that the U.$.
wants a regime change in - like the Middle East.
As author/journalist Juan Gonzalez has pointed out, the birth of the
Amerikan newspaper was around the need to share information about the
movements and behaviors of indigenous people and to rally the white
settlers around their genocide.(1) The idea of objective journalism was
a myth created much later in history, but the practice has been
consistent.
Just as the news supported the control of indigenous and African people
during the birth of this nation, the control of la Raza is at the
forefront of TV news today. The mass deportations while Obama has been
president are not done randomly. Aztlán is growing rapidly and with it
Latinos continue to multiply. Seven of the ten fastest growing cities in
the U.$. are in the area currently called the Southwest(2) and of these
seven cities all are overwhelmingly Latino states. The future must seem
very bleak for the oppressor nation. Thus they use their puppets to
attempt to curb this “invasion” and “re-conquest” as conservative
mouthpiece Pat Buchanan calls it.
Raza need to see Republicans and Democrats as one and the same. We need
to educate Raza so that we become our own liberators; national
liberation will never come from the ballot box. We need to educate our
families, friends and barrios, this needs to be done house to house and
persyn to persyn one letter at a time via snail mail if need be, but it
is the only way to ween Raza off of putting faith into bourgeois
politics.
We can look today at the many Latin@ elected officials and yet the
Barrios continue to be occupied and under siege! We continue to be used
as target practice by those claiming to protect and serve. Like our
Third World counterparts in Afghanistan who suffer “night raids” we also
get our doors kicked down in the middle of the night and the barrel of a
gun stuck in the face of our children. When the Afghan villagers hear
the helicopters they flee to the caves as they know all too well the
predators lurking in those chinooks, just as we rush to avoid the
spotlight when we hear the ghetto bird. It is a safari in the barrio and
we are the prey. The people of Afghanistan are far more oppressed than
anywhere here in Amerika yet we face the same oppressor.
The
Great
Leap Forward of 1958-59 in China was a special period in China’s
revolutionary history. The essence of which was to build communes. Today
in the imperialist controlled media the Great Leap Forward is distorted
as a situation that “killed millions” when in reality it was a socialist
economic and social development to enhance people’s power in the
countryside. Here in Amerika we are nowhere even remotely close to that
stage of development as Mao’s China. But just as early in the Chinese
revolution the peasants formed people’s communes, I see a future here in
Amerika where the people begin to form revolutionary committees. These
mutual aid teams will be anchored mainly in the barrios and ghettos but
eventually spread out to all areas where the oppressed nations reside.
These committees will work to provide the people with independent
outlets outside of the capitalist state in order to get the people to
begin exercising people’s power.
We of course are not at this juncture yet but it is a goal to work
toward in our communities, in our barrios and within our lumpen
organizations. We need education. Without learning and developing we
will continue hoping the Democrats make things better for us and
continue being hoodwinked. Now is the time to rebuild the Chicano
movement! The past struggles of our gente are not forgotten nor will our
martyrs have gone in vain or laid down only for us to stand in a line to
vote for an imperialist!
When people react this way to a Black man being murdered execution style
by the pigs, the city of Oakland blamed it on “outside agitators.”
1 November 2010, The San Francisco Giants won the World Series, and in
addition to the tens of thousands of fans in the stadium, an estimated
12 million people watched the game on TV (not counting the millions
watching in sports bars, restaurants and other public venues). As in
other winning cities in years past, the city of the winning team erupted
into “joyful mayhem,” as the San Francisco Chronicle calls it,
with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets in drunken
celebration that included property destruction, traffic disruption, and
violence.
In classic bourgeois press form, pretending neutrality, the SF
Chronicle’s headline article today was titled “SF Giants Series
Celebration is Joyful Mayhem” and stated: “On Market Street, the
celebration quickly turned wild and unruly, with an estimated 7,000
revelers in the streets, some jumping on cars, rocking Muni buses,
tossing beer bottles, lighting fireworks and blocking traffic at Seventh
Street.” A much smaller article, hidden on the Chronicle
website, also mentioned “In the Mission, there have been reports of
fires, broken windows and an alleged stabbing.” Compare this with the
same newspaper’s January 8, 2009 report on the Oscar Grant protests. The
article was titled “Protests Over BART Shooting Turn Violent” and gave a
negative review of the protest which “mushroomed into several hours of
violence Wednesday night as demonstrators smashed storefronts and cars,
set several cars ablaze and blocked streets.”
We see that the same street violence is condoned when it’s in the name
of professional sports. Police wandering the streets after the World
Series were friendly, often clapping and cheering, and shutting down
streets to help out traffic while enabling the celebration. During the
Oscar Grant protest the cops showed up in riot gear and
attacked the crowd.
While we’re no fans of imperialist
elections, the World Series victory happened the night before election
day and begs the comparison: people are more passionate about baseball
than they are about the political future of their country/state/city.
This is no surprise to those of us familiar with the decadence of
Amerikan imperialism. Amerikans don’t need to worry about politics – the
government is working in their interests to secure resources at the
expense of Third World peoples to maintain wealth at home.
Sports passion includes a remarkable number of fans cheering “we did
it!” and “we won!” as if they had anything to do with the team that won
the game. In reality the SF Giants, like all professional sports teams,
are made up of players from across the country, who are paid a
ridiculous amount of money to wear a jersey for this team. Their
allegiance to the city lasts only as long as the paycheck continues. In
fact people point to statistics about the Giants’ last World Series
victory 56 years ago when they were based in New York as if that team
had something more in common with the SF Giants than the font they use
for their logo.
MIM(Prisons) would like to take all the sports passion in Amerika and
turn it against imperialist violence or world hunger. We’d even call it
progress if people get off the couch and play sports rather than get
drunk watching millionaires play. Perhaps the improved circulation would
help people think a bit more rationally about politics and the relative
importance of professional sports.