Guerrilla History - Political Prisoners and the Black Radical Tradition w/Orisanmi Burton [Adnan Husain Show]

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

This is a cross publication from our sister show, The Adnan Husain Show. The Radical Academy is in session for an early edition, 9amET Fri Sept 4! Orisanmi Burton, a social anthropologist at the CUNY Graduate School and author of the profound study, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression and the Long Attica Revolt, joins Office Hours for a discussion of political prisoners, Black radical resistance movements, internationalism and anti-imperialist solidarity. We might have a chance also to talk about his new project that integrates Black Muslim militants thinkers and activists and think about aspects of the relationsip between the Black Radical tradition and socialism/Marxism. We will certainly have much to discuss about the importance of political prisoners in the imperial core and under settler colonial rule from the US to Palestine. Since the open letter addressed rhetorically in the Guardian to political prisoners in Iran and signed by many leading scholars, activists and even political prisoners, the question of the politics around prisoners and solidarity has come further to the fore. Without belaboring that particular controversy, now is an opportune time to learn about and from the experience of political prisoners and resistance. Join us with your questions and comments! You can buy Orisanmi's book: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/tip-of-... Follow him on Instagram:   / orisanmi_burton   Please support our fundraiser for students in Gaza taking my online course, Guerrilla History: Anticolonial Resistance History, Theory, Practice, for materials and supplies for their final history research projects and the costs to support an in-person version of the course starting in September for displaced students from Gaza on the campus of the American University in Cairo: https://chuffed.org/project/174168-su... Support the show on Patreon or Substack, if you can (and get early access to episodes)! www.patreon.com/adnanhusain https://www.adnanahusain.substack.com Or make a one-time donation to the show and Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/adnanhusain Like, subscribe, share! Also available as audio podcast on all major platforms: https://adnanhusainshow.libsyn.com X: @adnanahusain Substack: adnanahusain.substack.com www.adnanhusain.org  Help support Guerrilla History by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

Nismillah Rahman and Raheim. Salam, hello, peace to you all, and welcome to what I think is the 42nd edition of our office hour series, an almost weekly Friday live stream discussion. We are having an early edition today, so I hope you've all grabbed a coffee and are ready to start your day off right with a good discussion and really. an opportunity to learn. I'm really excited about today's program and discussion, and I think it's very timely and relevant, not only because, you know, we've just been engaged, of course, as you all know, in Black August resistance commemorating Black radical resistance in revolutionary history, and that next week is the 25th anniversary of the Attica revolt, at least the four days. We'll learn about how

we shouldn't think about it as just the four days, but it is the coming anniversary next week, September 9 to 13th in 1971 of the Attica Revolt. But in addition to those kind of commemorative historical opportunities for reflection and remembrance and collective thinking, of course, we all should be very well aware that Tufan Al-Axa, the Al-Axa flood operation launched, on October 7th, nearly three years ago, specifically targeted, capturing Israeli occupation military personnel to use to free thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held by the occupation. And meanwhile, over the course of the last couple of years, we've also become extremely aware in our solidarity movements that actionists in the UK in their campaign to disrupt

Elbit Systems, a key company in the Israeli war machines infrastructure in that country, have suffered extreme prison repression under the Terrorism Act and engaged in hunger strikes and so forth. And of course, less than two weeks ago, an open letter signed by many high-profile political prisoners and scholars associated with activism and analysis of the carcarsal state was published in the Guardian newspaper that formally addressed itself to political prisoners in the Islamic Republic of Iran. So clearly, there's a lot at stake politically in the question of political prisoners. And the Radical Academy is in session today in this early edition to talk about that. And with me, I think really probably the best person I could think of and somebody I've been,

you know, eager to speak with for a long time and welcome. to the program for the first time is Ori Sanmi Burton, a social anthropologist at the CUNY grad school, a member of the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective, an author of the, well, of many articles and other writings, but specifically as well, a really profound and important study, tip of the spear, black radicalism, prison repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. Ori, it's so wonderful to welcome you to office hours and to this discussion. Thank you for making time. Peace. It's my pleasure.

Well, there's so much to talk about. I wanted to start with maybe why the question of political prisoners, of prisons, are so important in how you in your study have used it to think about in a rather just, different way than carceral logics have typically presented it, what the prisons are and for, and so what prisoners are and their resistance, what it kinds of means. In other words, why did you want to write this study of political prisoners? Why do you think it's so important and illuminating to investigate those histories that have been repressed, denied, ignored in the past.

Peace. Yeah, thanks again for having me. Thanks for the question. You know, why I wrote the book is kind of a long, it's a long story. I'll give a shorter version, but I do come from a political family and members of my extended family have been political prisoners at different points in their life. And there are people that are very close to me that have done political prisoner support work. I've said a couple times that the first book I ever read by choice from beginning to end was Asada Shakur's autobiography. I was in, I don't know, ninth or tenth grade,

and it was just sitting on the bookshelf in my parents' house. And for some reason, it called out to me, and I read it all the way through. And that was the beginning for me of just wanting to learn. And so, but I didn't really, have an analysis of political prisoners at that point. It wasn't really until I started doing my research for what became Tip of the Spear that I reached a different level of consciousness around that. And if I could talk just for a minute about that process, I think it'll unfold onto, you know,

the broader question, which is to say, you know, I started out in my research for my dissertation in 2000. with a fairly standard kind of anthropological approach going out, you know, seeking answers, conducting interviews, sort of asking questions through an ethnographic sensibility. But one of the first people I interviewed, and I talk about this, this is how I start the book, was a brother named Eddie Ellis, who's now passed away, who was in Attica during the rebellion. and he helped form the Harlem Black Panther Party. And he essentially redirected me and said in a very gentle but firm way that I was asking the wrong questions. And that many of the questions that I was asking had already been answered. But that members of his generation had been unsuccessful in circulating the knowledge that they produced and getting that knowledge recognized as legitimate.

And that if I really wanted to do rigorous work that could have a transformative impact, if I really wanted to be a politically engaged scholar, that I should try to redistribute and excavate the knowledge that had already been generated. And so that was his assignment to me. And he passed away shortly thereafter. So I wasn't even sharp enough at the time to probe deeper. But it wasn't until I took him seriously, though. and I started digging. And when I started to dig in the archives

and start to ask different questions, I realized that there was a whole other genealogy of thought and analysis that exists, that is rigorous, that is more rigorous than dominant criminal justice understandings of what prisons are and how they work. And so tip of the spear turned into a project of trying to reinterpret

Attica through this other political genealogy and this other political genealogy was one that was produced, archived, theorized, and put into practice by people who became and were transformed into political prisoners by virtue not only of the correctness of their analysis but even more importantly, because of their courage and willingness and alignment to put that correct analysis into practice. And it's through the practice that their analysis was tested. And so this became the kind of orienting principle of all of my work is to really rethink this. And the crux, there's several core pieces to the analysis that I'm trying to surface, right? This isn't my analysis. I'm not creating a new

theory. I'm trying to reconstitute and represent a theory that a theory and a tradition that already exists. And the crux of that is that prisons are a domain of war. That's one. And then two, And this is specifically in the context of the sort of U.S. prison context, but we can see resonances with it elsewhere, especially in the writings and thinking of Palestinian political prisoners, that the prison is a intensification of the forms of domination and repression that exists beyond prison wall. And so you can't actually draw a clear demarcation between the inside and outside. It's a matter of degree and intensity. And that inside the prison, you're experiencing a compressed version of the forms of violence that are, you know, that circulate outside the walls. And this means then that the prison actually can become a methodology for analyzing how

imperialism works, how domination works in the broader world. And in some ways, those techniques are easier to see in the prison because it's an enclosed environment. And so, yeah, my work is really about thinking about, you know, imprisoned intellectuals and political prisoners as producers of knowledge that was so valuable and dangerous and threatening that it had to be suppressed and hidden and discredited and distorted at the same time that it becomes a kind of an engine and a testing ground and a laboratory for different kinds of counterinsurgent techniques. So that's sort of how everything developed for me. Yeah, that's really fascinating to make those kinds of connections.

And I think it's a very profound shift, of course, in the way that, you know, history typically talks about prisoners and prisoner revolts and, you know, what the whole purpose, you know, is. And so there's what this kind of framework of seeing it as war, an extension of war is, I think, very illuminating. I mean, as a historian, you know, who works on a much earlier sort of period in global history, the connections that the prison, particularly in the U.S. context, reveals about relationships between war, prisons, and slavery in particular, is really something that is profoundly connected with the history of war before the infrastructure of the state was developed, you know, in pre-modern polities that just couldn't mobilize the kinds of resources and techniques that have been developed subsequently in the modern era slavery was what you did with prisoners of war right like that's

you know the outcome of success in war is the enemy become is either killed or become slaves as an institution because you don't have one place you can put them and keep them and in fact people are too valuable you know uh to just take typically quarantine and warehouse in conditions of production and motive production where the surplus that's exploitable and extracted in like agricultural setting, it's just not possible to build a huge infrastructure of prison. So slavery was the way in which you managed populations of captive subordinates, you know, but then later in different phases of history, it has been possible to develop those prisons. And I think what your study does is really historicize how these

deeper connections and dynamics of war are related to, you know, kind of the, both the political conditions, but also you might say the socioeconomic realities of what's possible. And so I'm wondering if maybe you have other thoughts about the development of this. this kind of system that is often, you know, looked at as an extension of, you know, techniques of control and so forth after emancipation, you know, and the way that that has been talked about, typically from this legal perspective and how your, you know, analysis really departs from that or adds to that with a different level of analysis. No, thank you. I mean, you're exactly right. And, you know, I don't. treat this topic at length in tip of the spear, but I am working on some work that does extend this. But that kind of triad of war, prisons, and slavery is exactly, you know, kind of where some of my work is headed. And you're right that it becomes very difficult when you think about these things.

It becomes very difficult to disaggregate these things, both at a historical level. And at a theoretical level, really, in terms of the ontology, like, what is war, what is slavery, what is prison, and where do they overlap and where are they different? It becomes quite difficult to do that. And right, so, you know, slavery across time and place is a consequence of war. And you can only enslave someone once you have defeated them in war. And so, you know, within the context of the black liberation struggle, which is, you know, what my research focuses on, enslaved Africans were captured as prisoners of war and held in barracoons, transported on slave ships. These are, you know, floating, these are different kinds of carceral sites, which,

which is the infrastructure for enslavement, but it's also a technique of war, right, to incapacitate people so that they can't rebel. So, and then when you, if you think about the kind of definitions of war, so if we think about someone like John Locke, right, the investor in the Royal African Company, so a material beneficiary of the transatlantic slave trade, but also. you know, one of the core theorists of classical liberal theory, he wrote that slavery is nothing more than the state of war continued. So he's saying that slavery is war.

It's just a different state of war, right? Olauda Equiano said the same thing. Slavery is a state of war. So both the enslaver and the enslaved agree that slavery is, in fact, a state of war. And then you think about theories of slavery and theories of war and how these things are defined. So, you know, one of the kind of core theorists of war is Carl von Klauschwitz, the Prussian General who famously said that, you know, war is politics by other means. But he also defined war as an act of force to compel an enemy to do one's will.

So war is a struggle to impose one's will onto another. That's also a definition of slavery. So again, slavery is war. It's just a point. It's a stage of war in which one side's capacity to resist has been almost completely eradicated. And so the actual dialectical process to the push and pull seems like it has disappeared. And you have one side imposing one's will upon another. And this is why slave rebellions are called rebellions, right?

To rebelologically means the renewal of war. So even in the terminology itself of what happens when slaves resist, it's about the renewal of war. The war already exists. It's been kind of sublimated and normalized. And then to rebel is to renew that process. And so, you know, so we can go on and on about that, right? And then I guess the one other thing that I find really interesting when I talked about the kind of theory, I'm thinking about Susan Buck Morris's work. And, and And I know that that work has been the subject of critique, but, you know, she's looking at Hegel and the way in which when he's writing the phenomenology of spirit, where he outlines the master slave dialectic that he's actually reading about and thinking about the Haitian revolution. So the master slave dialectic is this canonical theorization of the ontology of slavery.

the relation between master and slave, but behind that is the actual historical unfolding of an anti-slavery revolution and rebellion. So I think all of these things are operating when we're thinking about the relationship between prisons, war, and slavery. So I'm trying to sort of think this through and systematize it. But you also mentioned how this disrupts sort of dominant genealogies, right? And I think, you know, there's different sort of critical interpretations of the history of prisons in the U.S. and one of the most popular ones is the prison slavery argument. And I think nothing that I've just said undermines the real.

kind of material and historical relationships between prisons and slavery. But I think it makes it more rigorous in that it shows that there's this other force operating, which is war, and that that force is a kind of interminable force that hasn't been disrupted. you know, but what it does do is kind of challenge the genealogy of the 13th Amendment as the kind of cause of slavery. I would argue that it's really a symptom of this condition of permanent war and that we need to think about the 13th Amendment as a tactic of war rather than the cause of slavery. because the cause of slavery is defeat in war. And I think if you read W.E.B. Du Bois's black, which is a key text for abolition, obviously,

but if you read that text really closely, he says all of this in there, right? He talks about reconstruction being defeated by a counter-revolution of property. He talks about the development of guerrilla warfare techniques. In this case, he's talking about the white working class engaging in different forms of vigilante violence and terrorism vis-a-vis the Ku Klux Klan and lynching, but he calls it guerrilla warfare. And he talks about how the civil war never ceased. He says that. He says the war was projected

into the future under conditions of peace. So Du Bois is talking about permanent war. He's talking about the persistence of slavery. He's saying the 13th Amendment didn't abolish slavery. And part of why it didn't abolish slavery is because this condition of permanent war persisted. So I think that's sort of how I would want us to think about that. And why this is important is because once we're in the domain of war, that forces us to think about tactics and strategy differently. It transforms how we're thinking about violence and the role of violence, both in repression and in rebellion. It forces us to understand George Jackson, this is a paraphrase, but he said, you know, we'll never succeed until we recognize that we have an enemy who is conscious,

organized, and ruthlessly counter-revolutionary. Right? And I, I think what is it that that's war that is a that is a wartime epistemology yes so that I think this helps reframe these histories and the political analysis that comes from them I think the profound point that you just made that is relevant for us in all times in studying these histories is that it really reframes the strategic goals and objectives and maybe at some point you know later we might talk a little bit more about where we are today and about the the kind of contemporary but i wanted to um investigate uh one other very fundamental uh foundational insight uh that helps reframe these histories and their value for us in a

totally different sort of way um uh while also acknowledging that i really uh will also acknowledging that i really would love to pick up on the whole question of liberal theory, starting with Locke, but also the reformist kind of logics of prisons, but perhaps we'll have a chance to think about that as well. But that is the other kind of deep insight that black radical thinkers adopted during this time period, which is to reframe their condition as objects of this war, having been enslaved and then even even post enslavement still being in a permanent state of war, as it were, is that they are a colonized nation, as it were, during the era of decolonization. This was a hermeneutic, analytical framework that spoke to more radical resistance and that also opened up

interconnections between the struggles domestically of black people in the, the United States, not as Malcolm X was always saying, look, don't think of ourselves as a minority and that the odds are against us because we are few. We need to think of ourselves as among the black, you know, what Du Bois would call the darker nations, you know, of the world. And we are suffering colonialism here, but we can see that colonialism is being contested, resisted, defeated elsewhere. We have to adopt that same kind of framework. So it seems like that was also a very important kind of component of the kind of war and the conditions of war that it is a colonial war for liberation of a captive nation.

And that seemed to be a very profound kind of reframing for these thinkers and therefore for you about how to think of where the prison fits in this kind of colonial condition. I'm wondering if you wanted to elaborate further on how those insights inform your analysis and the activists of their time in the black radical tradition. Yeah, thank you so much. You know, my thinking on this really points to, from my work, I mean, there's long histories of black internationalism that we can talk. about. But for me, I'm really interested in, you know, roughly the 1963 moment where I see a real shift in the politics of Black liberation away from civil rights towards decolonization. And I think that there are continuities that kind of traverse that shift, but then there are breaks. And I think, you know, after 1963, you start to see more discourses of decolonization being employed among black Americans. And I think this really speaks to the importance of the kind of global context and how that helped sort of reshape how black radicals and revolutionaries in the United States were thinking.

thinking and how they were thinking about liberation, turning away from a more integrationist and assimilationist politics towards thinking about, you know, what I would call different forms or different ways of experimenting with sovereignty. And again, these have longer genealogies. I mean, we can think about the, you know, black belt thesis going all the way. back, you know, so there are, you know, older genealogies. But really, you know, what's interesting to me is that, you know, what coincides with the thinking around decolonization is the methodologies of decolonization, because the methodologies that are being employed in Latin America, in Southeast Asia, in Africa are guerrilla warfare.

And guerrilla warfare includes, you know, several different kind of tactical repertoires. You know, there's obviously an armed military dimension, but there's an intellectual, you know, kind of scholastic dimension, you know, but building solidarity with different groups internationally, So I think, yes, this is really a central idea. And, you know, this becomes another kind of definitional question for me

because, you know, Malcolm, you brought up Malcolm, and I really like how you use this term of internal colonialism as a hermeneutic because a lot of people get wrapped up in trying to kind of clearly define the kind of definitional checklist of whether or not we can actually call it colonialism in the U.S. And I think that's fine. I don't have a problem with that. But the people that I study are the ones who are trying to actually test the theory through

praxis. And so the question for me is, what did the theory of intercourse? colonialism allow people to do or what did it compel them to do? And so that for me is a much more exciting question. It's also something that was very much on the minds of counter-revolutionaries. And this is the importance of studying war. You have to study your enemy. You have to pay attention to what they're doing. You have to read them. You have to to develop an ability to gather intelligence about them. And they were very concerned with this idea.

They found it to be very threatening. So that also tells us something. So there's a lot of writing about this growing internationalism and how it needed to be interrupted. Internationalism, not just within the broader movement, but also within the prison movement itself. There's a number of writings about how incarcerated people are beginning to think of themselves as political prisoners, that they're beginning to think of themselves

as, you know, kind of third world internationalists within the imperial core. Obviously, they didn't use that language. So that's also something really important. But you mentioned Malcolm and obviously, you know, Malcolm thought about the black condition in the U.S. as a colonial condition, but he also thought about the black condition in the U.S. as a prison, as a carceral zone. And so those overlaps, these metaphors or these ways of thinking about incarceration were manifold. But I think it definitely activated a form of internationalism and opened up a whole new kind of tactical repertoire for thinking about how to get free. Yeah, really interesting. I want to come to some of the specifics that you deal with now, you know, about Attica and what it, we've sort of started wide. And I want to come back into some of the history that you explored to illustrate some of these kind of the way in which resistance in the prison foregrounded these issues and advanced political thinking and analysis.

which is what makes the long Attica revolt, as you put it, so important to understand and also so threatening, as you just were alluding to counter-revolutionary and counter-insurgent type thinking. You start chapter three, Attica is revolutionary consciousness and abolitionist world-making. That's the title of the chapter. by quoting from an errant sheet of notebook paper that state investigators had collected in the course of the post-suppression of the initial four-day revolt that outlined three categories of political actors. And this is written by some unknown prisoner who was in. engage and involved in this struggle and thinking politically. And you quote the document, this notebook paper, saying the first category was pragmatists. They were defined as, quote, ask for practical institutional reforms without challenging

the very foundations of the established order, unquote. Second category, existentialists, an interesting use of that word, quote, no longer believe in institutionalized reform, but rebel culturally rather than politically, unquote. And then the last category, quote, finally come the revolutionary protesters, i.e. the militant minority, which believes that the American three case, American society is so corrupted by its military industrial governing class and its imperialist foreign policy. that only a revolutionary upheaval could bring meaningful changes." I wanted to give you the chance to use that to elaborate. What I think so much of this book is about is this development of a political consciousness

and an analysis that has been suppressed and ignored. And so, you know, what do you make of the revolutionary potential of these, of this struggle, you know, in terms of changing how people looked at the world and reframing it out of the conventional historiography or liberal reformist tradition that is identified even by this political prisoner as one of the options that needs to be thought through carefully. Yeah, thank you for that. I'm glad that resonated with you. What I like most about that is that it's just some anonymous notebook paper. Like it's just, you know, who knows if that person was like, you know, kind of a teacher or,

you know, a well-known figure or he might have just been, you know, kind of an anonymous person writing, thinking in his notebook. And I think that that speaks to the role that prisons were playing at this particular moment in that they were really incubators of revolutionary thought. So, you know, this is really a, I would argue that the prisons of today are designed to prevent this kind of thing from happening. There are all these infrastructures that have been put in place since Attica to try to minimize and to try to restrict the ability of incarcerated people to think in this way and to channel them to think in other ways. And so part of what was happening in the Atticcas of the world in the 70s was that prisons as a tactic of war were beginning to backfire,

which is to say that prisons were increasingly being, first jails were increasingly being used to take potentially insurgent black populations off the streets and out of circulation. And what happened is all that did, was shift the revolutionary energy to the prison itself because they thought that they could just incapacitate people and hold them there. But what they did is they collected, disaffected, the disaffected masses, the people who came in as the militant minority political prisoners. Some people came in as political prisoners. They also had people who were lots of Vietnam war vets

who had military and tactical experience. You had people who had been in paramilitary. gang formations. All of these people were just haphazardly collected into the prison at a historical moment of anti-colonial result and consciousness. And so prisons were really transformed in this moment into a school for the reproduction of revolutionary thought. So this then became a problem that needed to be solved. And that's what the second half of the book is about. But the thing that I think it's interesting about this document is the way in which it disaggregates different kinds of political consciousness within the prison. And I think this can help us problematize the general notion that many of us have about what a political prisoner is. So in the first instance,

political prisoners not, and there's no universal definition of what that is. And, you know, I often hear people say that the U.S. denies that it has any political prisoners, which is true. But almost no state admits that it has political prisoners, right? So the question of political prisoner opens up a question of the power to define the thing and to classify it. And there's lots of different kinds of people who could be collected under that term. And so it's interesting. And I think we're in a moment now that it might be time, because a whole new crop of political prisoners in the United States are being produced by virtue of the intensified repression that's happening, it might be time to reopen some of these questions and discourses. because the fact of the matter is that what is a political prisoner

has been the source of longstanding debate on the revolutionary left. And I just want to highlight the thinking of someone who's been very important to my development, and I know many others who watched this show, Duruba bin Wahad, who I believe this was either 78 or 79, wrote an essay toward the definition of the U.S. black political prisoner, trying to think this through. He wrote this while he himself was a political prisoner. And he tries to create some different distinctions and demarcations.

And I'll talk about why this is important. I won't take too long to do this. But the first distinction he makes is that there are conscious and unconscious political prisoners. He says essentially all black people are in some sense political prisoners because of the historical development of the black colony to use the language that we kind of introduced earlier, that in some sense black people as a whole are a captive nation. So this is in alignment with what we just said, right? But there are those who are conscious of this fact. and those who are not.

Right? So that's the first distinction. And these different categories of political prisoners have to be engaged differently through different methods. And they have different aspirations and desires. But then he goes, okay, within the category of conscious political prisoner, there's also different demarcations that need to be made. He says there's the activist political prisoner, and that's a broad category. But then he also talks about. about, let's see, activist political prisoner jail because of their political activity.

Then he also says there's reformist, integrationist, or civil rights activists who are made political prisoners. And these people tend to view the status quo as needing only certain modifications. And that change is sought solely through the self-perpetuating mechanisms of the system itself, or at best types of pressure are brought to bear in which case, unjust laws must be broken in order to draw attention to these laws, right? So the use of the language of breaking unjust laws is clearly a reference to the thought and philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King, who was a political prisoner at different points in time and wrote a famous, you know, letter from a Birmingham jail where he's critiquing liberalism.

DeRuba is saying, look, that is a category of political prisoner that we need to take seriously. but there are other categories. He says there's also the activist revolutionary, communist or black nationalist political prisoners. And the reason why it's important to make that distinction between what he would call reformist political prisoners and revolutionary communist or black nationalist political prisoners is that the latter find support much more difficult to acquire. So it's a question of legal strategy and support and a question of what are the different methods that are required to free these people from political imprisonment. And a purely legal strategy might be effective for a reformist political prisoner, but it's going to be much less so for a revolutionary political prisoner. He says where repression of the reformist idea is transitory and dependent upon ruling class,

subjective perception, the repression of the revolutionary ideal is an absolute and irreconcilable contradiction. Right. And so what are the methods of actually getting these people free? Again, he's writing in 1979. He became a political prisoner in 71. By 1979, the ranks of Black Panther and Black Liberation Army political prisoners had multiplied. So they're really thinking about, okay, how do we how do we deal with this on a strategic level and then lastly he said there's a there's a final category which he calls the political prisoner of war or the political prisoner of domestic and irregular warfare he says the fundamental distinction between this category of political prisoner in the u.s and the revolutionary activist political prisoner may not be apparent from a certain viewpoint

There's often little, if any, ideological distinction between the P-P-O-D-W and the revolutionary activist political prisoner. However, organizational methods, level of struggle, and tactical viewpoints can make for a very basic difference. Fundamentally, the distinction here is tactical in its basic and it revolves around, I'm paraphrasing here, So the revolutionary engages in armed struggle in ways that emphasize self-defense, the revolutionary political prisoner. He says the political prisoner of domestic war, as counterposed to this, also engages in offensive or irregular warfare. And for Deruba, this means that the possibilities for freeing political prisoners of domestic

war using the legal system and standard legal means are almost nil and the only way to free them essentially is through covert illegal underground methods such as jail breaks or prisoner exchanges. So I think, you know, Duruba was in and out of the prison right around Attica. So this is the kind of political ideology that was circulating. And so I kind of wanted to just highlight that because I know there's been a lot of talk about political prisoners. And I think what this discourse raises is that all political prisoners are not the same. They don't all have the same politics. They don't all have the same ideology.

So on the one hand, I agree with what the Palestinians say, which is that political prisoners are the compass of our struggle. I think that that's true. But that doesn't mean that there aren't contradictions. That doesn't mean that just because someone is a political prisoner that they're always right. And it doesn't mean that, yeah, I think I'll leave it there. But that's kind of what came up for me when you read that piece about breaking down these different categories of activists inside. Yes, yeah, no, this is absolutely fascinating.

I mean, I hope, I know that you have a project where you're publishing work with Duruba. I hope that piece will be something that's republished if it's not available widely now because that analysis and your elaboration of it in the context of this discussion is actually extremely valuable. It seemed to me analytically and historically and theoretically. So, you know, it also just reminds me so much of, you know, what I began with, which was that, you know, Tufan Al-Axa was, you know, very strategically interesting. interested in prisoner exchange in the kind of condition of Palestinian prisoners. It was led, you know, by somebody who had been a political prisoner and studied that condition as in the tradition that you have been working in with this study of the Long Attica revolt of how the conditions of the occupation were most clearly manifested and could be studied, examined, resisted in, you know, the prisons and jails of the Israeli occupation,

and that that insight is meant to inform the politics and the horizons of political imagination outside, you know, the specific prison. I mean, if you're in the West Bank and they've built this wall, if you're in Gaza and they've blockaded you, you know, people have always made this analogy of it as a prison, as a concentration camp, et cetera. And so I think those resonances and that analysis there is just very, very valuable for different contexts. They have their specificities, but, you know, that theorizing from those conditions gives a very different kind of analysis that's opening up possibilities and horizons of political imagination. I don't know if you wanted to follow up on something there.

But, yeah. Well, just on the politics of prisoner exchanges, I think, you know, Attica was an attempt at a prison exchange. And it was a continuity of several experiments with political prisoners in the U.S. of attempting to engage in prisoner exchanges, right? So, you know, the 1960s and early 70s in the Western Hemisphere was an era of prison exchanges. And, you know, I think one of the first big ones that I'm aware of was in 1968 by the PLO. And a political prisoner named Martin Sostra, who was incarcerated, in New York, read about that and started writing about that.

So Deruba's writing in 79, SOSHA is writing over a decade earlier before the massification of the incarceration of political prisoners. So he's an early one of this era. And he's thinking, OK, how do we get some leverage to get ourselves out? he saw that and starts writing and thinking about, okay, how can we engage in transnational prisoner exchanges? Let's see. Let me see if I can find this.

Yeah, he says, well, first of all, I mean, in 1969, Carlos Margella, who's a Marxist, Leninist, anti-fascist organizer, thinker. combatant in Brazil. He writes the mini manual of urban guerrilla warfare, which circulates widely in the U.S. And he talks about prisoner exchanges as a very effective method for freeing political prisoners. And Sostra is reading that. Many others are reading that. They're looking at what the Palestinians are doing. They're looking at a prisoner exchange that happens in the Dominican Republic. And he starts to think about how can we exchange what he calls captured enemy agents and enemy soldiers for black people in the U.S. And he starts to think about the development of transnational relationships that can facilitate this.

So he talks about the development of what he calls a mutual assistance agreement under which an Egyptian or Syrian freedom fighter capital. by Israel can be exchanged for an American pilot captured in North Vietnam, an Israeli officer captured by the Egyptians in the Sinai can be exchanged for an Afro-American freedom fighter captured by the oppressor in Oakland, California, right? So he's starting to really think about this. And others are thinking about this too. So you mentioned that we just finished with Black August. One of the key figures of Black August is Jonathan Jackson, who died, or was martyred in an August 7th attempt to capture hostages in the Marine County Courthouse in exchange for his brother, George Jackson, and others. That was an attempt at a prisoner exchange.

And he engaged in that action, I think, the day after or a couple days after the Tupamarros in Uruguay, who were a huge inspiration for George and Jonathan Jackson, had just assassinated a U.S. government official, officially working for USAID, but probably working for the CIA, who they had captured and tried to exchange for hundreds of their political prisoners in Uruguay. So this was kind of the dynamic, and the kind of reactionaries in the United States were thinking about this through a global lens. So actually in Attica, it wasn't one of the formal demands, but they had conversations about figuring out how to use their hostages to leverage the freedom of other political prisoners elsewhere. I think they named Bobby Seal and Angela Davis by name as two people that they wanted to exchange their hostages for. So they were having conversations about prisoner exchanges.

Now, Nelson Rockefeller, who was the governor of New York at the time, who had presidential ambitions, but was all. also at the very least CIA adjacent and had a whole intelligence gathering apparatus in Latin America and financial interests in Latin America. He had been harassed by the, his business interests had been harassed by the Tupamarros. So he's looking at Attica through the lens of international prisoner exchanges and talks about this explicitly. And so this is part of why he opts to massacre the rebels and shoot through the guards, as Joy James says, shoot through the guards to kill black rebels, the white guards. So they killed 10 of their own hostages. This is part of why he did that in such a public way. It was to send a global message

because he was part of international conversations about the rise of what they call political kidnappings and political exchanges. So he's talking with officials all over the globe about the spate of prisoner exchanges, and they understand that this action that's happening in this prison is part of this context. And Rockefeller had presidential ambitions. He wanted to be the president of the United States.

And so this was part of his campaign pitch to say, watch how I put an end to the prisoner exchange dynamic that's developing in the West. So that was a communicative act. He was attempting to send a message to the globe to try to say, look, the era of prisoner exchanges is over. And some people got that message and other people didn't. I mean, it didn't actually have the effect that he wanted.

But again, this is what I mean when I talk about, you know, when we said earlier that these international, connections were very apparent to the enemy. Yeah, and these are among the things that they regard as most dangerous, right? And potentially revolutionary and uncontrollable and destabilizing of the order, not just domestically, but of their international order. And, you know, it's because it seems to me, as you show so well in this kind of study and in other compatible, you know, historical analyses of the intersections and interrelations

between the projects of domestic control and repression with imperial, you know, war abroad, that in fact, actually the internationalism, the analysis, you know, moves from the actual material recognition that there are these interconnections. And so the resistance imagines and understands the important practice of solidarity, international solidarity, as part of the resistance and leverage across these boundaries. But then the counterinsurgency develops. I think it's important that you frame that as spectacular violence. I mean, I think that's something that we see as a technique.

I mean, I could go back to the Crusades. you know, where Richard the Lionheart, you know, that's by penchant, you know, everyone's groaning in the audience. There he goes again, the Crusades come up. But the way in which grumblings within the Crusader host about negotiations taking place between Richard the Lionheart and Salahideen, you know, they wanted to just have an assault on Jerusalem and he was busy negotiating. So at a certain point there was a lot of political pressure, you could say, on Richard the Linehart. So he went in to nearby Arab villages, slaughtered Saracens, the Muslim villagers, and brought the heads back as a demonstration effect to his domestic audience, that, look, see, I am still a crusader, even if I am negotiating, I can slaughter the barbarian. right? This kind of way of trying to do politics to try and leverage through spectacular violence what might not be possible, right, you know, militarily, politically. You know, this is a grammar of

colonialist, white supremacist, crusader politics. I thought it was so interesting, you know, that you framed it as a demonstration to advertise his appropriateness as a candidate for. managing the U.S. global empire, right? That's really important. But also just this, you know, internationalism also meant that I didn't know very much about and was excited to learn a little bit more about the chaos program of the CIA to sever links between social movements, as you put it in the U.S. and those abroad. this kind of counterinsurgent anti-internationalism to try and disrupt those links.

And of course, this is an era where, you know, political prisoners had escaped to Cuba. You know, you've got Robert Williams, you've got Asada Shakur, you've got all these people. And then also others have escaped to Algeria, newly decolonized from settler colonial rule of France. And you have the, you know, Black Panther Party's international, you know, section. And so there are these networks that are developing, you know, during that era. And I'm wondering about the techniques within the prison to really suppress this kind of internationalist solidarity and affiliation. You spend a lot of time in the book looking at ways of, you know, behavior modification,

the information war, the, you know, even introducing television. you know, so that people are spending their time and attention. I mean, what's the greatest, you know, could be a tool for radical action, but what's the greatest tool for pacification of people, you know, like the phone that every one of us has? And so I'm interested also, you know, that analysis that you had about the way in which counterinsurgency

used the psychological war, the information war. And how was that expressed and clarified in the prison context in particular. Yeah, thank you. You know, this is really important because when we talk about, so whenever I say, so when I talk about the Long Attica revolt, right,

it's trying to stretch the geography and the temporality of Attica. So when I say, you know, often when I'm talking about Attica, I'm talking about San Quentin. I'm talking about, I'm talking about Attica as a prism, through which to think about the politics more broadly.

But when you mentioned the spectacular violence, part of how they spectacularized it was that they brought, they allowed video cameras in, they brought FBI photographers in, they took pictures of the sexual abuse that happened, of the carnage that was created, and these images were circulated, and these images were circulated,

circulated in an era before the internet, right? Are they, you know, this grotesque image of the sort of prisoners of war that are recaptured after the rebellion, stripped entirely naked, becomes the cover of the official report that is supposed to be condemning Attica, but they're kind of... Like Abu Ghraib or something like that. Precisely like that. Precisely like that. So, right, so this kind of violence was meant to be seen, and this is usually what we think about when we think about the repression of Attica, and it's for good reason, right? I mean, we should think about it. We should talk about it. But often what happens is that that takes our attention away from the more subtle and seductive methods of repression. that were developed in the wake of Attica

that often don't even register as modes of repression, but in fact, register as forms of progress. And we could think about the meanings of progressive and if progress is something that we even want. Or what are the contradictions of progress under conditions of war? Do we want war to be more progressive? What does it mean to progress without fundamentally

altering the conditions? of war. How does that impact our own subjectivity and our own willingness to struggle? And thinking here with Palestinian martyred political prisoner Waili Dhaka, who talks about comfort as a weapon of war, as a way to erode the resolve of political prisoners. So, yeah, I mean, lots of different techniques were introduced. You mentioned, sort of behavior modification program. So the whole last chapter of the book is about that and the role of the CIA and FBI

in developing kind of secret mind and ideological manipulation techniques. You have the introduction of TVs, like you said, you have the proliferation of formal university-sponsored prison education programs, which of course are, have, you know, are used widely now. Part of what I try to get people to think about is the way in which these formal university-sponsored

prison education programs were implemented to displace already existing autonomously operating prison education programs that were about the social reproduction of revolution knowledge and replace them with a more kind of integrationist sort of bootstrapping uplift kind of ideology. And, you know, some people hear that and they get defensive because they're not able to hold the contradiction and they think that what I'm saying is that like all prison education programs are bad or if you do prison education programs, you're a reactionary or whatever, that's not what I'm saying. I'm trying to lay out the historical development of this technique

and to demonstrate its original intent and to place it within the context and to help us see that prison education was already happening, but it was a particular kind of education. I guess the last thing, because you mentioned Abu Ghraib, I wrote an article called Targeting Revolutionaries that has some information about this that's not in tip of the spear. I just couldn't fit it in. But in part, it traces the it it itinerary of a man named Donald Borden Kircher who started out as a prison guard in California and was elevated to the role of essentially. kind of like the head intelligence operative in California at the time when George Jackson was there. So there's no, I found no direct evidence linking them together, but he had, Borden Curecher had to know about George. And there's evidence that I'll share in a minute that suggested George knew about Borden Curcher.

or at least he knew about the kind of figure that this guy represented. Why he's important is because you mentioned Operation Chaos. In 1967, Gordon Kircher is tapped by the Office of Public Safety, which is an office within USAID to be, he sent to South Vietnam, to redevelop the prison system in South Vietnam, Vietnam to more effectively operate as a counter-revolutionary instrument to sort of reprogram Vietnamese nationalist militants. And he uses different kinds of psychological warfare techniques, including prison education programs, which in the context of Vietnam, he can abandon the

language of criminal justice. And he doesn't have to pretend like these programs are for a rehabilitative purpose. He just talks about, what does he call it? He doesn't call it behavior he calls it thought control or something like that. He's really explicit about what is doing in this context. And, you know, there's lots of rebellions actually in these prisons at this time. At the same time that they're rebellions in the U.S. there are rebellions in prisons in Vietnam. A lot of them run by women. A lot of the rebellions are by women political prisoners. They they were very rebellious at this time. Interestingly enough, after one of the rebellions,

it turned out that copies of the demands in Attica that were circulated in Attica had been translated to the Vietnamese language and were circulating in prisons in South Vietnam. Anyway, Bored and Kircher then becomes the one who's responsible for incarcerating Vietnamese men, women, and children in underground tiger cages. So there's this controversy, the tiger cages of Vietnam

that happens. That was Bored and Kircher. So this gives us an insight into how these techniques of counterinsurgency developed. You have the public facing soft side, the prison education programs, where you have volunteers come in and run these programs, and you can market them as very progressive,

but then you have this hidden underside where those who don't comply, the militant minority that the anonymous, anonymous incarcerated person in Attica was talking about. When you don't comply and you disrupt the prison education programs and you refuse to adhere, then you get put in the underside of the counterinsurgency, which is the repressive tiger cage technique. Board and Curcher Leeds Vietnam comes back to the U.S.

helps the FBI develop the prison activist surveillance program, which is another iteration of co-intel probe, but developed inside prisons. And then in the wake of Abu Ghraib, he's sent to Iraq to help manage the fall out there and kind of do cleanup, essentially. And of course, we know that many of the actual military soldiers who carried out those forms of torture and sexual humiliation had all. also been employed as U.S. prison guards prior to their deployment. So these are, again, some of the international circuits that are facilitating the transmission of counterinsurgent knowledge, and they pass through the prison, but they're also used

in other areas of imperial domination. And so part of what I try to do is like identify these figures and trace their itinerary and try to make those connections that aren't always advertised. Yeah, those are just so valuable histories to trace these networks of the imperial functionaries who, you know, don't make the news and whose trajectories as you're mapping out give you a very different view and pretty. perspective on how the system operates then are conventionally framed in the narratives in media, in history, that don't elucidate those interconnections. This is so important as a historical sources for theorizing how empire is working, the better to serve the resistance to it, right, which is exactly what that black liberation prisoners you know, we started part of this conversation with the analysis of like, you know, the three different kinds of people, you know, of political consciousness, you know, in the prison is this is actually, I think, again, a demonstration in some ways about the importance and significance of history for any theory and for liberation movement and strategy. that it helps us think through these systemic questions and see the similarities and differences to our own time,

which is somewhere where I would like to because we've been talking for a little over an hour and you've been very generous with your time. So maybe to come back to the contemporary and some of the outcomes of this sort of historical work that allows us to resist, you know, empire and, you know, in our own day, I had kind of a, I think you were alluding in some ways that not all political prisoners are the same, and maybe you were eluding to a particular form of analysis that has been circulated recently, that open letter to the Guardian, and your kinds of analysis of it. A lot of the figures who were signatories are key. people you've even mentioned at least a couple of them and I know you quote a lot of their work wonderful historians of black radical resistance of analysis of the carceral state who are part of

you know kind of abolitionist activism and scholarship were signatories to the letter including you know political prisoners who have a long history and credible you know they are you know, political prisoners who have been analyzing and thinking in exactly this kind of tradition, people like Mumia Abu Jamal. So I wanted to give you the opportunity to maybe connect some of this history with how you look at the questions contemporaneously about how to think about political prisoners, particularly in response to that open letter. One of the things that I think hasn't been discussed enough in the discourse around the letter and something I noticed immediately when I read it is that the authors express,

let me see if I can find. Here it is. They express, quote, a commitment to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-imperialism. And they list those things in that order. And I think that that reflects a misalignment of strategic priorities, which is to say that if we are to advance an abolitionist project, that that project needs to be tactically subordinated to anti-imperialism

because of the way that imperialism enables the West to assert political, economic, and military, and cultural hegemony over the rest of the world to use Walter Rodney's formulation of imperialism. Right. So it kind of, you know, it negates the capacity of nations to develop in a sovereign manner. And this is always the case, but especially so. under the conditions of kinetic war, a kinetic war of aggression, right? So I think, again, if we think about, for instance,

Mao's work on contradiction, he talks about, you know, when imperialism launches a war of aggression against a country, the contradictions that, the primary contradiction becomes between that country and imperialism. and the various contradictions among various classes become secondary. So I think for me, I'm interested in what is the consequence of foregrounding a notion of abolition as primary to imperialism. And then also this idea of anti-authoritarianism, also having that be listed as primary. primary over and above anti-imperialism, I think given what we laid out about the relationships

between the prison war and slavery, that we need to really think about what kind of work generic anti-authoritarianism does because the fact of the matter is that revolution is an authoritarian process. It's inherently authoritarian. I mean, you're imposing, a group is imposing its will upon another despite opposition. And they're going to resist that. So how do you, and this is like, I don't know the answer to this question, but like how do you create a revolution without the use of authoritarian means, right? It's the empire that deterred. It's, it's the empire that determines the terrain of struggle, right? So, you know, that's kind of an open question,

and I'm interested in that. And I'm interested in how, you know, in tip of the spear, I make the argument that a particular strand of what I call, you know, the book doesn't talk a whole lot about abolition, you know, but I think it is about what I would call this revolutionary genius. of abolition and how it actually was developed by incarcerated revolutionaries and through their praxis. And part of what I show is that abolition was but one among many different kind of, you know, revolutionary political visions that were circulating at that time, right? So there were people in Attica broadly conceived at that period who understood themselves as abolitionists.

There were people who understood themselves as revolutionaries, anti-imperialists. There were people for whom the concept of liberation was what that, you know, like there was a kind of a diversity of political philosophies and aspirations, and there were contradictions among them. there's a quote by a brother named Dalu Gonzalez who was a third world Marxist those were his politics and he said I'm not down with abolition because

what are we going to do with the Rockefellers and the Nixon's and shit right so again what is it what does the condition of war how does that reframe our tactical and strategic priorities. And how does it, and part of what it does is demand that we have some answer to the question of what do we do,

how do we respond to counter-revolutionaries who are going to use all means at their disposal to prevent any kind of revolutionary project from developing and flourishing and maturing. So part of what I'm interested in, on the one hand, I'm arguing that abolition developed from this kind of revolutionary imprisoned tradition. But on the other hand, it's interesting to note how, you know,

within the past 10 years, maybe more, I don't know, there's other people who would be better suited to kind of trace this assent over the past. 10 years, abolition within the Western Academy has ascended as a kind of singular language through which to think about radical and revolutionary politics. You know, with the fall of the Soviet Union, I think, plays into it the collapse of apartheid South Africa. I think, you know, we've been in this period where the kind of question of anti-imperialism hasn't been squarely on the table in the way that it is now. And I think that the way in which the resistance in Gaza, in Yemen, in Iran, have in the AES has put the question of imperialism back on the table in a kind of a concrete,

manner. We see people actually fighting against imperialism. I think that this kind of creates a crisis for the hegemonic abolitionist theory that has kind of taken hold within the Western Academy as of late. And I think that this letter and the misalignment of priorities that I think that that little quote I read reflects, this letter is kind of a symptom of the crisis of abolitionist theory that has emerged in the midst of actually existing concrete anti-imperialist struggle internationally. Yes, I really agree with that. And I think one other corollary symptom of this particular moment is also the suppression and abandonment of

of many of the actual components and tenants in progressive left culture of the abolitionist, black liberation, anti-police brutality, you know, movement that, you know, was so powerful, galvanized so many people with like people running from the defund the police, right? you know, and so this is happening, like you have this letter at the very same time that there is a distancing from the actual radical demands of that movement and instead using the power of that analysis or the prestige of that kind of analysis to be deployed, as you're saying, amidst imperial war. So this is another facet of it, is that it's not only as you're saying, that that's happening, but that it's also being accompanied by the actual withdrawal from making this publicly the continuing or renewing those kinds of demands at this moment as a technique for undermining imperialist war. And so, you know, in some sense, you know, I've said when in my initial remarks after this letter caused all of this discussion is that we should quickly analyze

this and use the discussion around it to refocus towards the actual political agenda. So I very much like your points about reemphasizing the primary importance of anti-imperialist politics, which has been placed on the agenda by the resistance that is actually in fact taking place. So it seems to me getting too involved in some of the fine details and as many have around this or I think in the unhelpful let's uh you know cancel these people kind this is all that's all a side show um for actually just analyzing politics at this moment uh successfully to be able to refocus um against this war you know against you know, imperialism as like the real pathway to a successful politics. And it's, again, that the

horizons of what your strategy, you know, what the strategic goals and objectives are, help you align your political action, you know, more effectively. And that's what a document like this confuses that, misalines some of those priorities, and contributes to kind of path. classifying people against focusing on where their efforts could be most effective in an organized fashion to, you know, combat imperialism. So I really appreciate that. No, that's so important, you know, this idea of focusing our attention. I don't, this is kind of a tangent, but it relates, you know, I'm thinking about the meta-settling that lawsuit for 18 billion, how it was trying to manipulate children but you know this is something I'm paying attention to

and you know I remember maybe 15 years ago it was revealed that meta did a kind of a social experiment on everyone where they added kind of depressing images to everyone's feed to try to get a sense if they could manipulate people's emotions on a mass level using Facebook this felt like that to me you know the amount of attention, and I'm implicated in this too. I spend a lot of time kind of thinking this and following this, but, you know, this developing this discipline that you're kind of encouraging us to develop around being very clear about how to have some sovereignty over our attention and being in alignment with what's important. I think for me, that's one of the lessons about this, right?

There were just so many people who were so eager to kind of just weigh in and lots of disrespectful things being said about Mumia on social media. You know, he has a right to have his opinion. You don't have to agree with it. Just because you don't agree with it, I think people were kind of showing their asses in that way. And so I found it to be very unprecedented. productive. So I do think that if we're serious, that's where we need to be thinking, what you just said. How do we keep our attention on what's important? How do we align ourselves so that our actions line up with our ideology and our beliefs and our ethics? So I appreciate that. Well, this has been just such a wonderful conversation that I feel is at the start of a conversation.

I could be speaking with you about your work and analysis for, I think, hours upon hours. And there's so many things that I would have loved to also take up about the book. I love the fact that you're really thinking about a gendered analysis and about the importance of a kind of different conception of manhood and masculinity. and the place that plays in the kind of resistant imagination and the kind of culture that is created at that kind of level, the references you have at times that I would love to speak with you more about in terms of this kind of spiritual component, the inner sort of life, the spiritual component as part of the resistance to this modification, disinformation, trying to train people's minds in a certain way, but how that might draw also upon Islam and, you know, Muslim identity that has been important for many of, you know, these theorists

and activists and intellectuals in the black radical tradition. And you just talked about Doruba. But we'll have to, you know, take this up again another time. But I just wanted to. to put in appeal again for people to support the, I've been putting it in the chat and it's in the description, the course online called Gorilla History, Anti-Colonial Resistance, History Theory, Practice that I am teaching for students in Gaza online. And the link is in there.

You can help support the in-person version of the course that will be offered to students displaced Gazans in Cairo, so we're raising additional funds for that, but also to thank you, Ori, for your work and also your generosity, not only in coming on the program today, but for this to be a resource that we will be assigning in addition to other of your work and other writings.

Next week when you and Ashanti Alston will be, the anarchist panther, we'll be joining the session for students in Gaza to contribute this knowledge, this insight. We've explored a few of the connections between, you know, Palestine and the United States. And that'll be opportunity, hopefully, for more. And with dialogue with students, you know, from Gaza, I want to thank you so much for your generosity today and for joining and participating in the course next week. And people can support that course by donating to help students for their final research projects,

the supplies, materials that they need, but in particular for the in-person version of the course that is about to start, I believe, next week in Cairo for displaced gossans who are there. Maybe you can also tell people as a way of concluding where they can follow you, what they should be looking forward to, anything upcoming that you want to tell people about how to stay in touch with the amazing and absolutely vital work that you're doing. Thank you so much. I try to minimize my social media. So I do have an Instagram, but I don't really post much on there. But you're welcome to follow me there. Otherwise, I'm not hard to find.

I have some projects coming out that will be announced in due time. So that's about all I have to share. Okay, well, we'll have you hopefully back on to talk about those when they're coming out because I think there's so much to discuss. So you're always, you have an open invitation anytime you have something that's coming out that you want to discuss and get to a broader audience to encourage them to engage. you're welcome office hours and the Radical Academy are open to you to join my man i appreciate you so much adon it's been a pleasure well it's been wonderful to gather together for this an early edition of office hours i want to thank

everybody who's been on the chat a wonderful discussion there many people appreciating the analysis and insight ori has brought and the work go buy the book if you can't buy the book tip of the spear black radicalism, prison repression, and the Long Attica revolt, ask your library to purchase it so that you and others can read it. That's the important thing. Read, think about it, organize in your communities. And until next time, peace with justice and solidarity to you all. Mismillah Rahman and Raheim.

Thanks again, Ori.