Rev Left Radio - Blood in my Eye: The Black Colony, Revolutionary Strategy, and Dual Power

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

In this first installment of our mini-series on "Blood in my Eye" by George Jackson, Breht introduces and reads segments of the text. In these sections, George Jackson talks about the folly of running socialist candidates for president, the fact of US fascism and its already-existing presence, revolutionary strategy and its relation to mass work, the "new pig class" made up of white reactionaries inside the American proletariat, the Black Colony, and much, much more. ------ Please Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, I'm going to do something a little different than usual. I'm going to be reading for this episode and perhaps a couple ones out. I'm thinking two to three installments. I'll be reading sections from Blood in My Eye by George Jackson. My initial idea was to do some sort of monologue-style episode where I read the book and then give my interpretation, pull out quotes that I think were important and sort of give an outline of the book.

But then I thought, I think it would be better to actually read George's words himself than for me to give my interpretation of those words. And then the thought came, well, maybe I'll just do an entire audio book of this text. But then I thought that would be five, six hours long. And there's lots of parts in here that are really, you know, they get down into the minutia of revolutionary strategy, which is not unimportant, but it would just take an incredibly long time to get through it all. So instead of doing that, I thought I'll just extract passages on certain topics from the book.

Topics that I think are particularly relevant right now. And I'll sort of stitch them together with, like, you know, hip-hop instrumentals as the transitions and whatnot. And so I decided that I was going to go with that. So today's episode will be the first installment from this little series that I'm doing now. And, you know, George Jackson in these sections that I extracted, he talks about electoralism, right, a huge and really important and timely critiques of it. He talks about a revolutionary strategy. He gives some really interesting class analysis.

He talks about the construction of dual power and its relation to overall revolutionary strategy, the difference between mutual aid and survival programs, and basically revolutionary violence as well. And that brings me to another reason why I didn't want to read this entire thing, which is that there are parts of this text which are incredibly gritty, incredibly explicit about the absolute need for intense violence. And I've already been visited by detectives before, so I want to put forward a little FBI disclaimer. Any talk of revolutionary violence in this section is a theoretical and historical interest. It's reading it for its historical and theoretical interest. It is not advocating whatsoever any illegal activity by anyone listening. These are not my words.

These are the words of George Jackson, who was killed by San Quentin Cops in 1971. So I just wanted to put that disclaimer out there. And I left out some stuff, particularly because if it were ever to be extracted and put out as if they were my own words, I would immediately have FBI agents at my front door. So again, I know the FBI is probably listening. These are not my words. I am reading a historical and political theory text. These are the words of George Jackson.

I'm not advocating anything illegal, anything violent, nothing to put any of my listeners in legal or existential trouble. So I want to make that very clear up front. And then the other reason is I want people to read the text, right? Or I'm going to extract these points. I'm hoping that people will find what I'm saying, what George is saying interesting and we'll find these paragraphs and chapters that I pulled out interesting and then go out and buy the text itself because I just think it's a fascinating

look into the black liberation struggles of that time and there are plenty of things that George is is putting forward that we can learn from here not necessarily the revolutionary violence parts but the building up survival programs of taking care of people in our community of building a revolutionary culture of indicting the white supremacist capital list system and its machinations. At one point, George talks about the new pig class and he talks about these fascist elements of the working class, right? White fascist elements that are technically in the proletariat, but are marshaled on the street level to the aid of the white supremacist government and its institutions, the police, etc. So he makes this interesting

class analysis and does a lot of other things that I think are incredibly important, incredibly insightful. There'll be things that you might disagree with that George Jackson says and the whole point of this episode, but more importantly, this entire show, is not to present you ideas that you already believe in so you can be force-fed them back, but rather to explore a wide range of different thoughts that you can critically engage in. Because one thing I truly, truly believe in is the intelligence of my audience. I don't think I need to force-feed you any lines or any positions. I don't think I need to just give you one set of ideas that are aligned strictly with one tendency, but rather give you a whole platter of different ideas to allow you to critically

engage with, to make your mind and intellect and your revolutionary character now more sharp, right, to embolden yourself in your own critical ideas and your own critical intellect. And so everything we put out, I encourage people to take what is useful to them and take what is useful for their organizing. And if you disagree with something, not to just, dismiss it as like oh that doesn't fit into my ideas of the world but to critically wrestle with it why do you disagree with it why is it wrong these things make us better thinkers and these things ultimately make us better organizers and better educators so without further ado this is going to be the first installment of my two or three part series on george jackson's blood in my eye

and all the the um the things i extracted for this episode come in the first 90 pages because after that there's some shorter essays and whatnot, and I'll get to those in subsequent installments. So this first part are things I just extracted from the first 80 or 90 pages or so. The first basically installment of this entire book. It's really one big chapter. So yeah, after this, there'll be more installments from other essays and stuff that he wrote in this book. So be on the lookout for that. And as always, if you like what we do here at Revolutionary Left Radio, you can support us on Patreon.

Patreon.com forward slash Rev. Left Radio. and in exchange for your hard-earned money, you have access to bonus content. You know, I think this month we put out three different Patreon bonus episodes just for people that support the show because we want to give back to those who give so generously to us.

So let's get into it. This is the first installment of Blood in My Eye by George Jackson. Enjoy. The preface to Blood in My Eye, written by Gregory Armstrong, October 1971. In his introduction to George Jackson's Solidad brother, Jean-Gene wrote, quote, Nothing has been willed, written, or composed for the sake of a book.

It is both a weapon of liberation and a poem of love. This book, too, is a weapon, but one entirely. willed and purposeful. It was completed barely a week before the author's murder in San Quentin on August 21, 1971. It was sent out of the adjustment center with specific instructions for its publication, almost as if the author knew that he would never live to see its appearance in print. Describing it a few days before the end, George said, quote, I'm not a writer, but all of it's me, the way I want it, the way I see it. What he saw and what he wanted, the central passion of his life was war, the revolutionary war of the people against their oppressors,

a war which grew out of perfect love and perfect hate. I've been in rebellion all my life, he wrote in one of his letters. For a young black growing up in the ghetto, the first rebellion is always crime. George's first experience with American law came at 14 when he was arrested in Chicago for stealing a purse. From then on, his life was a constant secession of arrests, juvenile homes, paroles, and more arrests. At age 18, he was convicted of stealing $70 from a gas station. His lawyer promised him that he would make a deal with the DA if George confessed to second-degree robbery.

He told George it was his only chance because he had a record. Don't put the court to the expense of a trial, and they will give you county time. Instead, he was given an indeterminate sentence, one year to life. The first time I was put in prison, it was just like dying. Just to exist at all calls for some very heavy psychic adjustment.

Being captured was the first of my fears. It may have been an acquired characteristic built up over centuries of black bondage. The turning point in his life came when, quote, I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Angles, and Mao, and they redeemed me. For the first four years, I studied nothing but economics and military ideas. I met the black guerrillas, George, Big Jake Lewis, and James. James Carr, W. C. Nolan, Bill Christmas, Tony Gibson, and many others. We attempted to transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality. He wasn't alone in his discovery.

At the same time, other prisoners were just beginning to discover Marx, Fanon, and Mao, who provided them with a new way of regarding themselves and their struggle, a new standard of moral judgment. I have been in rebellion all my life. I just didn't know it. The social insight of Marx and others made it possible for them to have a sense of themselves as members of the human community, members of a revolutionary brotherhood. In prison, commitment to revolution has a special meaning and a special price. To be identified as a revolutionary by the prison authorities means an almost permanent denial of parole, separation from the other prisoners, solitary confinement, usually in maximum

security wings of the prison, transfers from one prison to another, beatings, bad food. brings down on you the entire punitive and repressive force of a completely totalitarian system. Inside prison, George practice a very special kind of devotion in love. When convicts talk about him, they often use the term for real. Many inmates murder mouth and sell wolf tickets. They do a lot of heavy talking. But when it comes down to the point of action, they disappear. George, however, was as good as his word.

Whenever he made a statement of some kind, it would be followed. by action. If you were the victim of a racial attack inside prison, there was a good chance that he would turn up fighting for you, at your side. Most of his so-called offenses inside prison, the reasons why he was forced to spend over seven years in various forms of solitary confinement, including the infamous strip cells in Soledadad's Owing, the reasons why he was never paroled involved his defense of other inmates. What made him particularly dangerous to the prison authorities was this enormous talent as an organizer. Quote, we have got to get together.

We have got to be in a position to tell the pig that if he doesn't serve the food when it's warm and pass out the scouring powder on time, everybody on the tier is going to throw something at him. Then things will change and life will be easier. You don't get that kind of unity when you're fighting with each other. I'm always telling the brothers that some of those whites are willing to work with us against the pigs. All they got to do is stop talking honky. When the races start fighting, all you have is one maniac group. against another. That's just what the pigs want.

It is not coincidental that the need for unity among revolutionary groups is one of the major themes of this book. Quote, try to remember how you felt at the most depressing moment of your life, the moment of your deepest dejection. That is how I feel all the time. No matter what level my consciousness may be, asleep, awake, in between. The thing is there and it keeps me moving, pins my eye to the ball uptight 24 hours a day locked down in his cell george devoted himself to study his painfully acquired scholarship in the fields of marxian economics and history rivaled that of most college professors but sometimes for days on end reality itself would vanish from his cell quote

i would be sitting in a special locked isolation cell sometimes even with the lock welded shut and there would be no one to talk to just the sound of screaming voices and because there is no human contact you depend on books no contact with people special lock welded on the door nobody around i'm strictly by myself the only friend i had was a book sometimes i'd find myself talking out loud to the author i'd sort of wake myself up and i'd hear myself talking to this other person i guess it was like some kind of wish fulfillment when i'm asleep at night i still find myself talking to those guys typing laboriously on a plastic typewriter George published position papers which dealt with prison life and revolutionary politics from a Marxist point of view. He paid a heavy price for his activities. When the prison couldn't break him through solitary confinement, they attempted to have him killed by other inmates. Quote, they were forced to frame me and set me up for the final kill. The word was out among white convicts, get Jackson, it will do you some good.

Once he remarked that there had been 20 setups on his life inside prison. It got so that when he left his cell, he was always ready to parry and attack. But nothing could mitigate the pain of confinement, and the years stretched out in a whole decade passed. In the context of his life, what happened next had a grim inevitability. On January 13, 1970, a new exercise yard was opened in the maximum security wing of Soledad Prison. Eight whites and seven blacks were skin searched and sent out into the yard. predictably a fight broke out between the whites and the blacks without any warning a tower guard who had a reputation as a crack shot begin to fire he fired four times and three black inmates were killed one white prisoner was wounded in the groin by a shot that ricocheted black survivors claimed that one of the wounded men bled to death on the concrete floor three days later the monterey county grand jury found that the killings were justifiable homicide less than half an hour after this verdict was announced on the prison radio, a white guard, not the guard who had fired

the shots, was found beaten to death. All the convicts in the wing where the killing took place were put into isolation. On February 28th, Fleet of Drumgo, John Clachette, and George Jackson were formally charged with the murder. The prison authorities accused George because, in their words, quote, he was the only one who could have done it. With their total power over the inmate population, the power of parole, solitary confinement, the power of life and death, they were certain they could get the kind of testimony they needed when the trial came. When George's parents came to visit him, they used to bring his younger brother, Jonathan. George and Jonathan would go off to one side of the visiting room and whisper together.

What went on between them can be seen in this book in the excerpts from Jonathan's correspondence. At the age of 16, Jonathan had an extraordinary insight into the nature of girl of warfare. In some of his letters, George was later to refer to Jonathan as his alter ego. After George was accused of the murder of the Guard on the 16th of January, Jonathan began to get his first taste of American justice. Jonathan himself wrote, quote, People have said that I am obsessed with my brother's case and the movement in general. A person that was close to me once said that my life was too wrapped up in my brother's case

and that I wasn't cheerful enough for her. It's true. I don't laugh very much anymore. I have but one question to ask all you, people and people that think like you. What would you do if it was your brother? On August 7, 1971, Jonathan Jackson entered a courtroom in San Rafael, California, and attempted to free three black convicts, one of whom was on trial for assaulting a guard. He armed the convicts and took five hostages, including the assistant district attorney and the judge, still dressed in his robes. He died a few minutes later in a hail of bullets inside a

rented van that was being used for the getaway. We're taking over, he said. At 17, Jonathan had already come to the conclusion that the only way he could affirm his sense of justice was at the point of a gun. His experience of life in America had convinced him that the only way he could be heard was by an act of suicidal daring. You can take our pictures. We are the revolutionaries.

With these words, he announced to the world that he was not a criminal because he no longer recognize the legitimacy of white law. When his sister heard the news of his death, she cried out, but he was only a boy. Her mother corrected her. Don't say that. He was a man. They killed his father a long time ago. Jonathan wasn't going to let that happen to him.

He was going to live like a man. After his death, George wrote in a letter, quote, I haven't shed one tear. I'm too proud for that. A beautiful, beautiful man-child with the submachine gun. He knew how to be with people. I love Jonathan, but his death only sharpens my fighting spirit. I'm proud just to have known that he was flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. In a news conference three days after, he said, I loved that boy.

I was the first to stand him up in his crib. Not a crib, really. All he had was a box. I taught him how to walk. I wanted to teach him how to fly. I'll think of him now as I think of Che Guevara. George Jackson's last book, Blood in My Eye, speaks with the voice of the dead. Not only the dead George Jackson and his brother Jonathan, but the living dead in all of the jails and ghettos of this country.

It speaks with the voices of the men who have already given themselves up for dead and who have nothing left to give, except a death for the people. It is very much a book by a man who considered himself doomed. In his last letters, George wrote about the judicial process as the end game. He had foreseen and foretold his assassination at San Quentin a thousand times. Ten years of blocking knife thrusts and the pick handles of sadistic pigs, he said. The fact that the author of this book lived with his death for so many years gives his book a kind of special importance. But it would be a mistake to consider it simply as the work of an individual. George always refused to consider himself an individual.

untold thousands both inside and outside prison join in its proclamation of total revolutionary war this book was written literally in bedlam with the author locked in solitary for a minimum of twenty-three and a half hours a day in the midst of raucous screaming that never stopped the screams of prisoners being beaten the screams of men retreating from intolerable pain into madness It is a book about taking that revolution that George worked and died for inside prison out into society at large. His message to his revolutionary brothers is crystal clear. Settle your quarrels. Come together. Understand the reality of our situation. Understand that fascism is already here. That people are already dying who could be saved.

That generations more will die or live poor, butchered half lives if you failed to act. do what must be done discover your humanity and your love in revolution pass on the torch join us give up your life for the people George Jackson was shot and killed

inside San Quentin on August 21st 1971 the convicts who were with him inside the cell block where he was being confined have asserted that he sacrificed his own life to save them from an official massacre This would only have been in keeping with the character of his entire life.

Gregory Armstrong, October 15th, 1971. Blood in my eye by George Jackson. Any explanation for social phenomena, past, present, or future, must present valid arguments and proof. as we travel back into history honest descriptions and definitions will inevitably overlap they will differ depending on their geopolitical standpoint ideally they should be colored with as little subjective interpretation as possible from today's world the present due to its staggering complexities is almost as conjunctual as the past we must prove our predictions about the future with action so all my comments must be considered the merest supposition they must be considered in just the same way we must consider all other comments in this area. They merit attention only in that as soon as I make them, it won't be

much longer before I go about proving them. As a slave, the social phenomena that engages my whole consciousness is, of course, revolution. The slave and revolution. Born to a premature death, a menial subsistence wage worker,

odd job man, the cleaner, the caught, the man under the hatches without bail, that's me, the colonial victim. Anyone who can pass the civil service examination today can kill me tomorrow. Anyone who passed the civil service examination yesterday can kill me today with complete immunity. I've lived with repression every moment of my life. A repression so formidable that any movement on my part can only bring relief, the respite of a small victory or the release of death.

In every sense of the term, in every sense that's real, I'm a slave to and of property. Revolution within a modern industrial capitalist society can only mean the overthrow of all existing property relations and the destruction of all institutions that directly or indirectly support existing property relations. It must include the total suppression of all classes and individuals who endorse the present state of property relations or who stand to gain from it. Anything less than that is reformed. government and the infrastructure of the enemy capitalist state must be destroyed to get at the heart of the problem property relations otherwise there is no revolution reshuffle the governmental personnel in forms without changing property relations and economic institutions and you have produced simply another reform stage in the old bourgeois revolution The power to alter the present imbalances, to remedy the critical defects of an advanced industrial state ordered on an antiquated set of greed-confused motives, rests with control over production and distribution of wealth.

If the 1% who presently control the wealth of the society maintain their control after any reordering of the state, the changes cannot be said to be revolutionary. A quote from John Garaci. The prerequisite for a successful popular revolution is that the victors totally junk the old machinery of state. Lenin stressed in the state and revolution, quote, One thing especially was proven by the Paris Commune, that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes. And again, Lenin says, quote,

The working class must break up, smash the ready-made state machinery, and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it. The reason is simple enough. A popular revolution means a revolution by and for the popular classes. Its ultimate aim is to bring all classes into one, that is, destroy the class state. Revolutionary change means the seizure of all that is held by the 1% and the transference of these holdings into the hands of the remaining 99%. If the 1% are simply displaced by another 1%, revolutionary change has not taken place.

A social revolution after the fact of the modern corporate capitalist state can only mean the breakup of that state in a completely new form of economics and culture. As slaves, we understand that ownership and the mechanics of distribution must be reversed. The problems of the black colony and the brown colony, those of the entire 99% who are being manipulated, can never be redressed as long as the necessary resources for their solution are the personal property of an extraneous minority motivated solely by the need for its own survival. And that extraneous minority will never consider the proper solutions.

We have this on record from a voice speaking from inside the Fourth Reich, a lieutenant governor of California or rating in public on poverty. Quote, one-third of the population will always be ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed. Many urban problems are really conditions that we cannot change or do not want to incur the disadvantages of changing. quote. His one-third statement was a calculated understatement. To the slave, revolution is an imperative, a love-inspired, conscious act of desperation. It's aggressive. It isn't cool or cautious. It's bold, audacious, violent, an expression of icy, disdainful hatred. It can

hardly be any other way without raising a fundamental contradiction. If revolution and especially Revolution in America is anything less than an effective defense attack weapon and a charger for the people to mount now, it is meaningless to the great majority of the slaves. If revolution is tied to dependence on the inscrutabilities of long-range politics, it cannot be made relevant to the person who expects to die tomorrow. There can be no rigid time controls attached to the process that offers itself as relief, not if those for whom it is principally intended are under attack now. If the proponents of revolution cannot learn to distinguish and translate the theoretical into the practical, if they continue to debate just how to call up and harness the conscious motive forces of revolution, the revolutionary idea will be the loser. It will be rejected. The principal reservoir of revolutionary potential in America lies in weight inside the black colony. Its sheer numerical strength, its desperate historical relation to the violence of the productive system, and the fact of its present status and the creation of wealth

force the black stratum at the base of the whole class structure into the forefront of any revolutionary scheme. 30% of all industrial workers are black. Close to 40% of all industrial support roles are filled by blacks. Blacks are still doing the work of the greatest slave state in history. The terms of our servitude are all that have been altered. The black colony can and will influence the fate of things to come in the U.S. The impact of black revolutionary rage actually could carry at least the opening stages of a socialist revolution under certain circumstances, not discounting some of the complexities created by the specter of racism.

However, if we are ever going to be successful in tying black energy and rage to the international socialist revolution, we must understand that racial complexities do exist. When the Minister of Defense and Servant of the People attacks the strategy of the American Communist Party and the liberal left revisionists for their failure to devise a policy which takes into account the special circumstances of Yankee-style racism. He is not attacking communism in the collective ideal.

He is questioning the Communist Party and other less committed sections of the left revolutionary movement about their awareness of the unique problems represented by a particularly vicious and immediately threatening racism. My brother Jonathan, a communist revolutionary to the core, writing me in June of 1969, theorized as follows, quote, We are quite obviously faced with the need to organize some small defenses

to the more flagrant abuses of the system now. I mean this in a military sense. The period of disorganized activity of riots and rallies and purely political agitation education has come to a good. close. The violence of the opposition has brought it to an end. We cannot raise consciousness another millimeter without a new set of tactics. Long-range political ploys alone are not practical for us. To me, the concept seems to assume that someday, in the distant future, will produce a 700-pound flee to fight the paper tiger. That's not too likely to happen. While we await the precise moment

when all of capitalism's victims will indignantly rise to destroy the system, we are being devoured in family lots at the whim of this thing. There will be no super slave. Some of us are going to have to take our courage in hand and build a hard revolutionary cadre for selective retaliatory violence. We have numbers on our

side if the whites who support revolutionary change can prevent this thing from degenerating into a race war. The picture of the U.S. as a paper tiger is quite accurate, but there is a great deal of work to be done on its destruction, and I'm of the opinion that if there is a big job of growing to

do the sooner begun the sooner done end quote both hughy and jonathan are understandably calling for the programmed revolution to take into account the fact of racial genocide jonathan is calling from his grave adding another voice to the many thunderous graveyard affirmations which for us blacks speeds the revolution to its ultimate issue in order to develop revolutionary consciousness we must learn how revolutionary consciousness can be raised to the highest point by stimuli from the vanguard elements. We recognize and appreciate the decades of hard, sometimes dangerous work done in the name of revolution by the older socialist parties. Perhaps we wouldn't exist at all if it were not for their efforts. It is our sincere wish to operate in complete harmony with these older groups.

But we must create new impetus and greater intellectual and physical energy if the forces of reaction are not to win another extended reprieve. A joint effort will make the task of overwhelming our common enemy all the simpler. But if our present differences cannot be reconciled by an honest and fearless search for the correct way, then we will be forced to take the foundation of correct ideals and theory into our own hands and build a positive and more practical superstructure applicable to the circumstances surrounding our lives. In his guerrilla warfare, Lenin wrote, quote, new forms of struggle, unknown,

to the participants of the given period inevitably arise as the given social situation changes. The coming crisis will introduce new forms of struggle that we are now unable to foresee. In other words, the old guard must not fail to

understand that circumstances change in time and space, that there can be nothing dogmatic about revolutionary theory. It is to be born out of each popular struggle. Each popular struggle must be analyzed historically to discover new ideas. In the words of John Jurassic,

quote, building from one to the other, eventually the revolutionary cadre would become equipped with a theory rooted in experience, broadened by historical knowledge, tested by combat, and fortified by reflection. After 10 or 15 generations of laboring on a subsistence level, after 140 years of political agitation and education, we grow impatient.

Not that we fail to understand the risks and complexities of anti-establishment warfare, we simply want to live. We question a strategy that seems to have stopped short of providing a tactic for growth and for survival. Terror tactics like lynching will never be allowed to work on us. If terror is going to be the choice of weapons, there must be funerals on both sides. And let the whole enemy power complex be conscious of that. The superstructure of any edifice that is as extensive and as lofty as revolution must be re-examined with each successive layer for faults for possible improvement of method. We have the foundation of our strategy.

We have studied Marx and Lenin for a description and history of the modern industrial state. We've organized our thoughts and trained our bodies for the ordeal of grave digging. Our vanguard elements understand the simple importance of winning consciousness. Of course, education and familiarization with the core issues on a broad basis precede hard revolutionary violence. If people are to understand and relate to revolutionary violence, they must first be educated into an acceptance of the fact that there is no alternative or that the alternative is less

inviting than a fight. Our whole question is this. Just what level of consciousness will support the violent revolutionary activity necessary to achieve our ends? And how will we know when this level is reached? Recall, our Mao teaches that when revolution fails, It isn't the fault of the people. It's the fault of the Vanguard Party.

The people will never come to us and say, let's fight. There have never been any spontaneous revolutions. They were all staged, manufactured by people who went to the head of the masses and helped direct them. The liberalist slogan, you can't get ahead of the people, is meaningless. From what other position can one lead? From the rear? Rear guard leadership? A typical Yankee innovation.

I think most of these irresponsible excuse slogans are based on dread, a secret wish to avoid the discomfiture of people's war. In all the successful class struggles and colonial wars of liberation, the vanguard elements did get ahead of the people and pull. There is no other way in forward mass movement. Quote, Lennon, a vanguard which fears that consciousness will outstrip spontaneity, which fears to put forth a bold plan that would compel general recognition

even among those who differ from us, Are they not confusing Vanguard with rearguard? Now, I'm not implying that the Vanguard party act out the people's role. I am not implying a society superior to society. We must never forget that it is the people who change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. Going among the people, learning from the people, and serving the people is really stating that we must find out exactly what the people need

and organize them around those needs. If the statement implies a coming from somewhere else, it substantiates no superiority but rather a biological existential reality. This concept needs very little substantiating beyond the obvious fact of a nation of slaves who control no more wealth than some clothes, perhaps a worthless automobile, and a roof of sorts over their heads,

but who have been successfully conditioned to feel rich, or at least contented. the task of a revolutionary is to make revolution the word manufacture can be substituted for the word make and the meaning comes through a little better for us the fascists have deliberately manufactured a false sense of security by various stratagems they will never permit conditions to go out of their control as long as bread and circuses appease

we clearly cannot dodge our responsibilities by giving credence to slogans built around conditions Conditions will never be altogether right for a broadly based revolutionary war unless the fascists are stricken by an uncharacteristic fit of total madness. Should we wait for something that is not likely to occur, at least for decades? The conditions that are not present must be manufactured. Recall, we had people who felt conditions weren't right in the 1930s as well. The government's breadlines were backed up around every corner and baseball was at its peak.

private ownership of public property should have been destroyed in that decade but the conditions weren't right the vanguard elements betrayed the people of this nation and the world as a result of their failure to seize the time the consequences were a catastrophic war

and a new round of imperialist expansion this time carried out by the greatest imperialist of all time the Yankee brigand there would be no Indochina situation to mention one of dozens of like situations if we had taken ourselves seriously then when all conditions were favorable. It was a slightly below-conscious desire to avoid doing the U.S. further violence,

and perhaps a general distaste for organized violence in particular that robbed us of our chance to win on that occasion when, ironically, a win would have cost very little. There wasn't then even the illusion of well-being. Lenin, Guevara, and Fanon, all in their particular fashion, postulate that, before revolution can take place, all other forms of redress must be exhausted, clearly exhausted. Electoral processes must have broken down. The confidence of the electorate in any of the old forms completely shattered. Confidence in the ability of the old system to honestly organize any aspect of public life must be shaken to the core.

years and years ago it may have been an acceptable tactic to organize a people's ticket of solid worker and revolutionary credentials and arm it with an ideal platform only to be defeated by a mud-slinging opportunist warlord demonstrably inferior scum-swilling pig then pass out a pamphlet to explain to the people how the system has failed them or speak it in pershing square or years ago in the campus hall today it is not a tactic it's counter-revolution After 40 years, it's pretty clear that it will not suffice. Years ago, working with and attempting to influence union leadership may have been judicious, but the government has long since infiltrated and bought off this leadership and legislated away the strike. Union Hall speeches and pamphlet passing are playing at revolution. It isn't revolutionary or materialist to disconnect things. To disconnect revolutionary consciousness from revolutionizing activity, to build consciousness with political agitation and educational issue-making alone is idealistic

rather than materialist. The effect has been reformism rather than revolution. When any election is held, it will fortify rather than destroy the credibility of the power brokers. When we participate in this election to win, instead of disrupt, we're lending to its credibility and destroying our own. With all the factors of control over the electoral process in the hands of the minority ruling class, the People's Party can always be made to seem isolated, unimportant, even extraneous. If these tactics still give the appearance of revolution to some after decades of miscarriage, we are justified in replacing them as Vanguard. When people begin to express their disgust at the demagogic and reformist maneuvers of the

Vanguard parties, they will discover in real action a new form of political activity which in no way resembles the old quote from france fanon in the wretched of the earth these politics are the politics of leaders and organizers living inside history who take the lead with their brains and their muscles in the fight for freedom these politics are revolutionary and social and these new facts which the native will now come to know exist only in action they are the essence of the fight which explodes the old colonial truths and reveals unexpected facets, which brings out new meanings and pinpoints the contradictions camouflaged by these facts. The people engaged in the struggle who, because of it, command and know these facts,

go forward, freed from colonialism and forewarned of all attempts at mystification, inoculated against all national anthems. Violence alone. Violence committed by the people. Violence organized and educated by its leaders makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them. Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there's nothing but a fancy dress parade and the blare of the trumpets. There's nothing save a minimum of readaptation, a few reforms at the top, a flag waving. And down there, at the bottom, an undivided mass still living in the Middle Ages. Endlessly marking time.

In the general retreat to avoid full commitment, to write the discomfort out of revolution, some have raised a debate among us that has degenerated into name-calling, quoting the same authorities to validate diametrically opposed ideas, and ultimately creating a process that is dividing us into two mutually exclusive or contradictory groups. The overall effect is to reduce us to caricature. Where more than one individual is involved in any life situation, the fact of subjectivism will always make differences based on opinion and interpretation, a problem in exchanges in reaching the necessary means for the initiation of collective activity.

Some debate will always be carried on. However, on the basics, we must somehow agree or nothing will get done. All opinions are not of equal value, and there is such a thing as counterproductive revisionism. stupidity is not unknown to our long-range political policy makers. Participation in electoral politics organized by the enemy state after recognizing that the whole process must be discredited as a conditional step into revolution and particularly participation that tends to authenticate this process is the opposite of revolution.

It's a tactic for the ultra-rightists. With history as a guide, we could never make such monumental errors. The history of the U.S., the blood-soaked, urine-steeped essence of its being, the wreckage and demise of its human character under the wheels of a 200-year-old headlong flight with heedless, frightened animals at the controls of a machine that has mastered them, allows for no appeal on a strictly ideological level. George Wallace or Adolf Hitler would fare better at the polls of an honest election in this country than Huey Newton or Tom Hayden.

but again what is an honest election after the fact of monopoly capital repression is indeed a part of revolution a natural aspect of antithesis the always-to-be-expected defense attack reflex of the beleaguered toothless tiger all arguments against this fundamental fact are false and labored to the point of being completely illogical can power be seriously challenged without a response will the robber baron the tycoon the feeder allow us to the point of being completely illogical can power be seriously challenged without a response will the robber baron the tycoon the feeder allow us to seize his privilege without resistance? Can we steal it away from the greatest bandit of all time with sleight of hand alone? Incredible. The fascists understand the value of mass psychology. They're familiar with its use and hold all the important implements of its effective control. But they are not aware of our existence and our general strategy regarding the reaching of people. The whole situation can be reduced to a minority ruling clique engaging the people's vanguard elements for control of the masses. The ruling click approaches its task with a what-to-think program.

The vanguard elements have the much more difficult job of promoting how to think. No tactic can be ignored or discounted in such a battle. Power responds to all threats. The response is repression. If the threat is a small one, the fascist tactic is to laugh it off. Ignore it, isolate it with its defense mechanism, the media. The greater the threat, the greater the corresponding violence from power. The only effective challenge to power is one that is broad enough to make isolation impossible

and intensive enough to cause repression to affect the normal lifestyle of as many members of the society as possible. By compromising and playing at class war, we lose. If some effective means of threatening to wield power is not used in the opening stages of revolutionary activity, repression will concentrate itself on the vanguard elements only, when the ideal situation is for the people to feel, the raw essence of power. Nothing can bend consciousness more effectively than a false arrest, a no-knock invasion, careless, panic-stricken gunfire.

These will frighten some and anger others. Common sense alone tells me whom the people will turn their anger against. Perhaps for a short time they will be angry at us, but since the pig is a pig, it won't be long before this anger is channeled in the right directions. Revolution builds in stages. It isn't cool or romantic. It's bold and vicious. It's stalking and being stalked.

The opposition rising above our level of violence to repress us and our forces learning how to counter this repression and again pulling ourselves above their level of violence. That process repeats itself again and again until finally the level is reached where the real power of the people is felt and the ruling class is suppressed. The power of the people lies in its greater potential violence.

Top-heavy establishment organizations that exist openly are always a reflection of the men who staff them. Of primary interest to the guerrilla are the bureaucratic institutions that serve to protect the right of the wrongdoers to do their wrong, the local and federal pig establishments. The complexities of the class structure have shifted somewhat since the time of Marx and Lenin. Presently, within the working class, there exists an ultra-right section at the bottom of this structure, which feels that all of its demands, on life can be met by the existing order. In fact, the working class of the USA, 1971, can be realistically divided into two mutually exclusive and conflicting sections, one right-oriented and conservative, the other left or neutral.

One explanation for this phenomena is the loss over the years to fascist nationalistic propaganda and state-controlled unions of a clear-cut class consciousness. In effect, it can be said that this right-oriented sector of the working class is a new class. a new pig class. In their ranks, we find a factory or construction worker, the ubiquitous civil service employee, the retired military career man, the man who sells used autos or insurance,

the stock clerk or longshoremen about to be replaced by a machine. All of these individuals are not clearly in the new pig class, some only have just one foot in the grave. As yet, they only have pig tendencies and can still be redeemed. Outright pigs must be either neutralized or destroyed, From the new pig class, a section of the working class whose demands are small and are being slowly met by the capitalist masters, the government draws its greatest support. The forces of counter-revolution make themselves felt on the street level through this new class. While above this class, in the loosely defined petty bourgeois level and upper middle class professionals and students, we can actually find some very real revolutionary consciousness.

As a side note, I just want to reiterate that point. he says the forces of counter-revolution in this new pig class right the segment of the working class that is fully reactionary make themselves felt on the street level this is exactly what he's talking about in 1971 can be applied directly to the right-wing weirdos the trump supporters the proud boys the militias these fascist groups who do battle with the left in the streets most of them while some definitely come from the petty bourgeois and even maybe higher a lot of them do actually come from the from the proletariat, even in some instances, the lump in proletariat. And they do make up this hyper-reactionary, very white, very male-oriented, aggressive, you know, street violence. And it's really interesting to hear George Jackson talk about that. In 1971, of course, that existed. The same basic formations exist. They just, of course, shift identity, and they shift these little ways over time. So the proud boys in 2020 look different from whatever brown shirt, fascist reactionaries that they're doing battle with in the streets in 1971,

but it's the same basic formation. And I really like this idea of calling this reactionary segment of the working class, a new pig class. At the very least, it sort of stretches some of our Marxist ideas and makes us contemplate the role that these reactionaries play in relation to the institutions of white supremacy and capitalist domination. But back to the text. There are explanations for this complex,

invertex inverted stratification of revolutionary potential, the history of the USA and its immigrants, the emphasis placed on subversion of the workers' movement, the unions, by the ruling class and the apparent not real, stabilizing of the economy with fascist Keynesian controls and redoubled imperialist expansion, all can be carefully treated to explain the present confusion and contradictions in the class struggle. But most of this I leave to Comrade Newton, who has handled it well so far. This is a comment on what to do with what we have and what we are realistically faced with. The top heavy bureaucratic agencies that exist with quasi-social sanction and in particular the ones that are given over to the maintenance of law and order draw their principal personnel from the

pig class and consequently are an expression of that class's mentality, a stagnant, even adivistic mentality that is completely dependent upon regimen and rote to perform the simplest of functions. First of all, the opposition is stupid. However, let me qualify this statement with the observation that they make up for what they lack in brains with sheer brutality. As a result of their original drawback, stupidity, they have expanded to massive proportions and tied themselves irrevocably to a technology based on massive and equally faulty machines to the point now that it is impossible for them even to hide any of their movements, to move with any real speed, or to change themselves in response. to any change in our attack. The very nature of their apparatus, its supposedly gality and its size,

tends to weaken it. Their growing demand for personnel leaves them helpless to stop us from infiltrating them. Their cybernetics cannot overcome the fact that men, especially of the pig class, are cyclic. They think function and live in cycles.

This is more to their detriment than ours. Their science of control turns upon them to weaken and wreck their own institutions. How can a massive department or bureau or regiment with hundreds of personnel ever coordinate any activity without the strictest regimentation, without a massive meeting place to familiarize themselves with procedures, without badges or uniforms to identify each other, without systematized patterns of thought and behavior, without dependence on clear-cut orders. Simple pig types can only learn

to function by rote and in cycles. Procedure must be drilled into them, and only seldom if ever changed. It is quite easy for a pig to perform a particular function the same way time after time once he has learned the function. It is not so easy to vary, especially when there are great numbers of the same types of individuals involved. What would be the result if each pig were given a different job each day in a different area, or if he had to vary his code every week or think for himself for one eight-hour shift? Chaos. If it weren't for the sergeant or lieutenant in a routine, When the average pig ran out of gas, his car would have to be pushed out of the street by the citizenry. When his bullets ran out, he would have only a club until he could check with the captain.

Cyclic men equipped with only a few learned responses can be watched, clocked, photographed, and anticipated. Their code isn't really a code at all. They are finished. A pig is a fool. They have numbers over the small vanguard element and the social license to kill, but once we decide on the proper action, we will find, that our enemies are vulnerable. At some point in the development of the overall struggle,

revolutionary culture will have to become totally independent of the old enemy culture in keeping with Che's theory of molding the new society around the struggle against the old. We will start from the beginning to build our own infrastructure in every possible area. People's stores, hospitals, banks, buses, armies. This dual power, this building of political infrastructure and the military, is succinctly stated by the Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton, quote, We recognize that in order to bring the people to the level of consciousness where they would seize the time, it would be necessary to serve their interests and survival by developing programs which would help them to meet their daily needs. For a long time, we have had such programs not only for survival, but for organizational purposes. Now, we not only have a breakfast program for school children, we have clothing programs.

We have health clinics which provide free medical and dental services. We have programs for prisoners and their families, and we are opening clothing and shoe factories to provide for more of the needs of the community. Most recently, we have begun a testing and research program on sickle cell anemia, and we know that 98% of the victims of this disease are black. To fail to combat this disease is to submit to genocide. To battle it is survival. All these programs satisfy the deep needs of the community, but they are not solutions to our problems. That is why we call them survival programs, meaning survival pending revolution. We say that the survival program of the Black Panther Party is like the survival kit of a sailor stranded on a raft.

It helps him to sustain himself until he can get completely out of that situation. So the survival programs are not answers or solutions, but they will help us to organize the community around a true analysis and understanding. of their situation. When consciousness and understanding is raised to a high level, then the community will seize the time and deliver themselves from the boot of their oppressors." In following the strategy, we at once fill a very real vacuum that already exists in the black colony, brown and poor whites too, where the people are not being fed, clothed, provided with adequate medical treatment or transportation facilities.

This will create the consciousness that comes from the introduction of people's government. It will help the people to understand the force and energy of revolution. We are organizing them around their needs. We will not distract them with such empty questions as who will be elected from which political party. All political parties, as things stand, will support the power complex. Any individual elected will either be a supporter of the established politics or an individual. What would help us, in fact, is to allow as many right-wing elements as possible to assume political power. The warnings that our thrusts towards self-determination will bring on fascism are irresponsible or

better unrealistic. The fascists already have power. The point is that some way must be found to expose them and combat them. An electoral choice of 10 different fascists is like choosing which way one wishes to die. The holder of so-called high public office is always merely an extension of the hated ruling corporate class. It is to our benefit that this person be openly hostile, despotic, unreasonable. We are not living in a nation where left-wing parties hold 80 out of 200 seats in a congressional body, or even 8 out of 200. This is a huge nation dominated by the most reactionary and violent ruling class in the history of the world, where the majority of the people just simply cannot understand that they

are existing on the misery and discomfort of the entire globe. They have been hypnotized into believing that criticism of the expansionist policies of imperialism is really isolationist or injurious to both the USA and the world. We are faced with two choices. To continue as we have done for 40 years fanning our pamphlets against the hurricane or starting to build a new revolutionary culture that we will be able to turn on the old culture. No argument has any substance if it conflicts with the objective conditions, the clear, incontrovertible facts. In our case, these facts can be read from the nation's dally's in the obituary section.

Blacks who seriously advocate for revolution are killed. Blacks who attack property relations are slated for the graveyard or the prison camp. It's a national, cultural tradition. Since these are the facts, it follows that, quoting Lenin, quote, an oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves. We cannot forget, unless we become bourgeois pacifists or opportunists, that we are living in a class society,

that there is no way out of this society and there can be none except by means of the class struggle. In every class society, whether it is based on slaves, slavery, serfdom, or, as at present, on wage labor, the oppressing class is armed, end quote. The Vanguard cannot stay alive long enough to affect a broad consciousness unless it possesses the latent threat of force. They're going to claim that our clothing projects, the people's bazaars, the people's stores, and decentralized cottage industries, are fronts for stolen property. The establishment will claim that the Vanguard party is feeding and clothing people with goods stolen from the old enemy culture. They'll claim that we're buying it from the city-states lumpen, who steal everything they can sell, or that we're ripping it off ourselves.

Of course, this will be used to justify an attack upon our political projects, our infrastructure. The assaults will be justified by them in a dozen different ways, whether we establish ourselves in storefronts or in our own homes. They will attack us, behind the fire ordinance, the sanitation department, the anonymous tip. The establishment's mercenaries will break in shooting, and all of us who are not, killed will go to jail for violating the fire ordinance resisting arrest attempting murder and receiving stolen property etc it's as predictable as nightfall i'm convinced that any serious organizing of people must carry with it from the start a potential threat of revolutionary violence without it the establishment forces will succeed in isolating the political organizer and closing down his project

before the people can feel its benefits self-determination requires a small hidden highly trained army equipped with the very best and most destructive of military weapons and a bodyguard of counter-terrorists. The Vanguard Party distinguishes itself in the service of the people and superimposes itself over the old culture through the city-state. Tactics designed to further the development of revolutionary consciousness must be based upon the prevailing state of class and race antagonisms created out of the new relationship. We can be certain that the nucleus of a clandestine army will already exist by then. The government's repriments were oppressive agencies will also be well infiltrated by blacks and other revolutionary people.

Infiltration is the work of the professional revolutionary. Infiltrating the establishment's protective agencies will also tend to neutralize the ruling class's attempt to isolate the black vanguard commune from the larger body of the class structure. All efforts to isolate the vanguard community must be resisted. The black colony must actively invite other revolutionary people to follow their example. We must give refuge to the refugees, and eventually, essentially work out some means to coordinate our operations with theirs at every level. However, we cannot delay our own preparations toward a united black revolutionary culture.

No one will undertake to aid us unless they sense the power of our movement. It is blacks who must play not only the role of liberating the black colony, but also the leading role in the liberation of the whole city-state. To expect that someone else will take the full responsibility for our own liberation is suicide. We'll be asked to be patient for another one. 100 to 150 years. We'll get stuck with long, theoretical explanations on consciousness or objective conditions when it's clear that consciousness will not grow unless there is something among us willing to feed it.

Consciousness grows in spirals. Growth implies feeding and being fed. We feed consciousness by feeding people, addressing ourselves to their needs, the basic and social needs, working, organizing toward a united national left. After the people have created something that they are willing to defend, a wealth of new ideals and an autonomous subsistence infrastructure, then they are ready to be brought into open conflict with the ruling class and its supporters. This conflict must extend to every level of capitalist production and distribution. Consciousness of our power will grow as a result of this mass contact with the ruling forces. There is no question that people must be organized and educated to the benefits of people's government before they can successfully move.

move against their class enemy. However, there seems to be some question as to how seriously we should take ourselves and our work of organizing. When we meet resistance, should we acquiesce, withdraw, waded out, or intensify? Should we meet violent reaction with a more determined violence? The type that put 80 tanks to flight in Laos? In other words, if the fascists don't like what we're doing and attack us through a lynch mob, the police forces and judicial branch of their government, should we relent?

or should we accept their violent reaction as a natural response to our challenge and organize against it? Every step, every stage toward a unified black commune will meet great resistance. This resistance will come in some form of violence. It is clear that if we don't learn to overcome all resistance, no forward movement will be made. Discovering ways of meeting and overcoming resistance, demonstrating to ourselves that we can, is a fundamental antecedent to the growth of revolutionary consciousness because we'll be under attack every step of the way. 100 years ago it would have been the same.

100 years from today, it will be the same. We'll take our mule in 40 acres now, collectivize them, defend them, invite other revolutionary people to follow our example, make allies, then leap to destroy the fascist pseudo-mass culture from within. As the people move into more significant areas of anti-establishment project, they will be hurled violently into contact with the defenders of the present state of property relations at the level of production, distribution, and property rights in general. Then we will discover that their power and their new fighting style actually depend on their greater potential for violence.

The size and complexity of a thing are not an index of its strength. This struck me forcefully one evening as I flipped through one of the nation's news weeklies and spotted a photograph of a huge self-propelled 155, millimeter cannon lying on its side. Its barrel spiked forever. A man on foot, armed with a rocket that weighed less than four pounds, had destroyed it. Total repression and genocide are not possible if we organize ourselves for survival first. If we first construct the commune, a sense of community, a common interest of class. The objective conditions are present.

To postpone our liberation with the excuse that the people aren't ready is to underestimate them. In effect, it's like saying, they don't have the mentality to act in their own defense. We can only be repressed if we stop thinking and stop fighting. People who refuse to stop fighting can never be repressed. They either win or they die, which is more attractive than losing and dying. The primacy of politics remains, but we must now prepare for armed confrontation. By no stretch of the imagination can we hope to overthrow so determined an enemy without force.

We will win. George.