You’re listening to Back in the USSR on CFRU 93.3 FM in
Guelph. I am Siegfried. And this is stolen native land. As the RCMP, Canada’s colonial police force, launches
a full-scale invasion of sovereign Wet’suwet’en
traditional territory in the region known by the colonial name of British
Columbia, as courageous land defenders are arrested and as the bulldozers move
in to begin construction of the LNG pipeline, we are again reminded of the
truth about this country as a settler-colonial state built on genocidal
violence. Others have been arrested too,
including dozens of protestors who blocked access to the port of Vancouver for
72 hours over the weekend, and who were rounded up by cops Sunday night. There have been many blockades, many solidarity actions, including several in Guelph itself as brave people put their bodies on
the line to stop this vicious land grab by the colonial-capitalist system. But this is also Black History Month, and tonight
I’m going to be continuing my tribute to the heroes of the African-American
struggle for liberation by discussing a man who understood colonialism,
capitalism and fascism on a deeper level, because he, like the Wet’suwet’en
land defenders, was faced with all of them during his time in the racist
American prison system and he understood how they were all connected. I’m speaking of George Lester Jackson, the “Prisoner
Prophet”, whose life and writings I want to focus on here tonight.
(Note: The script for this show was largely inspired
by Colin Jenkins’ excellent article “Prisoner Prophet: Revisiting George Jackson’s Analysis of Systemic Fascism,” The Hampton Institute, November 15
2018).
On August 21st, 1971, George Jackson was shot and
killed by a prison guard in San Quentin state prison, California, during an
alleged escape attempt. At 29 years old, Jackson, who was imprisoned a decade
earlier on an armed-robbery charge, died three days before he was to begin a
murder trial stemming from the death of a guard. One year earlier, Jackson made
national headlines when his 17-year-old brother, Jonathan Peter Jackson, had
attempted an armed insurrection at the Marin County Courthouse in San Rafael,
California in order to free the "Soledad Brothers" (George, Fleeta
Drumgo, and John Clutchette), the trio of inmates who were accused of killing
the guard in retaliation for the murder of three Black prisoners a month prior.
Jackson’s death came in the immediate aftermath of a
tumultuous decade that included the Civil Rights movement, the black power
movement, and a series of liberation movements rooted in radical democracy that
had shaken America to its foundations. Major figures in these movements, like
Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X remain well known, but many
of the radicals working in the trenches of these revolutionary movements have
been discarded from popular historical memory, both through a deliberate
erasing from above and a general fear of facing hard truths about American
history and society. George Jackson, who
fought against crushing odds to organize and politically radicalize his fellow
African-American prisoners, rarely gets the credit he is due.
As Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther
Party would later say, George Jackson “had genius…[and] when genius is combined
in a Black man with revolutionary passion and vision, the Establishment will
cut him down” (Revolutionary Suicide, pg 331).
For 11 years, George refused to be broken by the prison system. He resisted the authorities and encouraged
his brothers in prison to join him in this resistance. As Huey Newton describes, “The state
retaliated: parole was continually refused, solitary confinement was imposed on
him for seven years; threats on his life were frequent…he was one of the few
prisoners who was shackled and heavily guarded for his infrequent trips to the
visitors’ room…but he never gave in or retreated.”
Jackson's work on the anatomy of American fascism in
particular has gone largely unrecognized, but is extremely useful in
understanding the rise of far-right politics in the age of Donald Trump. This
is for two reasons. Firstly, Jackson's insight, as a working-class Black man, was
formed purely from a place of organic class-consciousness that was subsequently
refined and confirmed through self-study and direct experience combating systems
of oppression in daily life. Second, it comes from the view of a
hyper-marginalized member of the working class from within the epicenter of
imperialism. As a Black man in America, and thus a subject of America's
internal colonization, Jackson could not ignore the powerful, underlying
effects of white supremacy on the class nature of systemic fascism. The unique
history of American slaves and descendants of slaves makes this inclusion an
absolute necessity for any analysis of American fascism.
If Jackson were alive today, he would stress that Trump
is not "bringing fascism to America," but rather that fascism was
built into the American project from day one. To gain an understanding of
fascism, one has to gain an understanding of the social and economic systems
that breed not only extreme hierarchies, but also extreme forms of domination
and subjugation within these hierarchies.
In the United States, the most influential system is
capitalism. It exceeds all else, including politics and government, because it
is rooted in the one thing that dominates all else - money. Capitalism concerns
itself with two goals: growth and profit. In its narrow-minded pursuit, things
like humanity, democracy, freedom, liberty, Earth, and the environment cannot
be considered. They are nuisances to be co-opted or destroyed. And, the late
stage of capitalism that we are living through is the culmination of this
co-optation and destruction, with the colonial invasion of sovereign Wet’suwet’en
land by the Canadian state, in collusion with the fossil fuel industry, being a
perfect example of this.
In order to understand the systemic fascism that is
rising before our eyes, we must understand the historical seeds of Americanism,
and of settler-colonialism, that have provided it with a fertile breeding
ground. Jackson understood this better than most, as laid out in his two
prominent works, Blood in My Eye and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. The autocratic nature of capitalism, which
relies on dominant mechanisms of private property and labor exploitation, is
key to the rise of fascism, and this is revealed in the four major phases of
capitalist development in America: (1) capital accumulation that has produced a
completely unchecked capitalist class, (2) a formation of the corporate state
through the literal purchasing of governmental institutions by the capitalist
class, (3) increasing economic hardship for a majority of Americans, and (4) a
complete reliance on state violence both home (militarized policing) and abroad
(imperialism/war) to control working-class angst and develop new markets
outside of the United States to replace living-wage labor.
As early as 1970, Jackson recognized the coming era of
the 21st Century because he understood America's roots and the
historical trajectory of capitalism. More specifically, he recognized the
emergence of monopoly capitalism as a formative stage in the transition from
bourgeois democracy to the early stages of fascism.
"The trends toward monopoly capital began
effectively just after the close of the Civil War in Amerika. Prior to its
emergence, bourgeois democratic rule could be said to have been the predominant
political force inside Amerikan society," explains Jackson. "As
monopoly capital matured, the role of the old bourgeois democracy faded in
process. As monopoly capital forced out the small dispersed factory setup, the
new corporativism assumed political supremacy. Monopoly capital can in no way
be interpreted as an extension of old bourgeois democracy. The forces of
monopoly capital swept across the Western world in the first half of this
century."
This transition opened the door for the neoliberal
era, which began shortly after Jackson's death in 1971, and was designed to
cement the capitalist system in a newly formed corporate state. The most
obvious elements of this pattern are that of political cooptation and the
growth of direct state repression.
"Corporative ideals have reached their logical
conclusion in the U.S. The new corporate state has fought its way through
crisis after crisis, established its ruling elites in every important
institution, formed its partnership with labor through its elites, erected the
most massive network of protective agencies replete with spies, technical and
animal, to be found in any police state in the world. The violence of the
ruling class of this country in the long process of its trend toward
authoritarianism and its last and highest state, fascism, cannot be rivaled in
its excesses by any other nation on earth today or in history."
As Jackson intimately understood, the ultimate
expression of this state repression is, and always has been, found in America’s
racist criminal justice system – and he would say the exact same thing about
Canada, where indigenous people make up 5% of the country’s population but over
25% of its prison population. With the advent of laws, so-called rights,
criminal procedures, police, courts, and prisons, the illegitimate systems of
dominance (such as capitalism and white supremacy) have long been given a
façade of legitimacy, and thus have become naturally classist and racist. In
the end, these systems of so-called justice only target those at the bottom of
socioeconomic hierarchy, serving the same purpose that a head on a spike served
in Medieval times - a warning against all those who dare challenge the embedded
power structure. Jackson elaborates:
"The hypocrisy of Amerikan fascism forces it to
conceal its attack on political offenders by the legal fiction of conspiracy
laws and highly sophisticated frame-ups. The masses must be taught to understand
the true function of prisons. Why do they exist in such numbers? What is the
real underlying economic motive of crime and the official definition of types
of offenders or victims? The people must learn that when one
"offends" the totalitarian state it is patently not an offense
against the people of that state, but an assault upon the privilege of the
privileged few. Could anything be more ridiculous than the language of
blatantly political indictments; "The People of the State vs. Angela Davis
and Ruchell Magee" or "The People of the State ... vs. Bobby Seale
and Ericka Huggins." What, people? Clearly the hierarchy, the armed
minority."
This national system of domination and incarceration
mimics its international cousin of imperialism, which exists to serve
capitalism by carving out new markets, gaining control of resources, and
forcing populations into wage servitude worldwide. This process comes full
circle from its international face (imperialism and foreign occupation in the
name of the Fortune 500) into a national face (domestic occupation and mass
incarceration). Jackson continues:
In terms of domestic authoritarianism, the ultimate coercive
tool is the prison system. In the United States, especially following a series
of 1960s radical grassroots movements once referred to by the ruling class as
an "excess of democracy," much of the state's repressive apparatus
has transformed from covert (i.e. COINTELPRO) to overt (prison industrial
complex, "The New Jim Crow"). Jackson had pinpointed this repressive
institution prior to its massive expansion that began in the 1980s, providing
insight to both the capitalist underpinnings of the prison system and the
cultural baggage that comes with it.
"The purpose of the chief repressive institutions
within the totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and prohibit
certain activity, and the prohibitions are aimed at very distinctly defined
sectors of the class - and race - sensitized society. The ultimate expression
of law is not order - it's prison. There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons,
and thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social
peace. Anglo-Saxon bourgeois law is tied firmly into economics. One can even
pick that out of those Vital Statistics. Bourgeois law protects property
relations and not social relationships. The cultural traits of capitalist
society that also tend to check activity - (individualism, artificial
politeness juxtaposed to an aloof rudeness, the rush to learn "how
to" instead of "what is") - are secondary really, and intended
for those mild cases (and groups) that require preventive measures only. The
law and everything that interlocks with it was constructed for poor, desperate
people like me."
Jackson recognized the inherent connection between
authoritarianism and capitalist modes of production, and most specifically the
working class's subordinate relationship to capital. This systemic class
analysis is something sorely missing today, further obscured by the focus on
Trump as an individual phenomenon capable of shaping society. Uncovering these
important roots comes in the deduction of capitalism as an inherently fascistic
system, reliant on the forced separation of the masses from the land, and thus
feeding on coerced and exploited labor since day one.
"The nature of fascism, its characteristics and
properties have been in dispute ever since it was first identified as a
distinct phenomenon growing out of Italy's state-supported and developed
industries in 1922," Jackson writes. "Whole libraries have been
written around the subject. There have been a hundred 'party lines' on just exactly
what fascism is. But both Marxists and non-Marxists agree on at least two of
its general factors: its capitalist orientation and its anti-labor, anti-class
nature. These two factors almost by themselves identify the U.S. as a
fascist-corporative state."
An important part of Jackson's analysis is the role
that is played by moderates and liberals within a political system that is
arranged for the specific purpose of placing everyone in a war for inches - a
war that is fought on a predetermined battleground which benefits the ruling
class, whether the capitalists themselves, the military industrial complex, the
prison industrial complex, or the politicians that exist to protect these
embedded systems. In other words, electoral and legislative reforms are
designed to appear as "progress" atop a landscape where
meaningful/revolutionary progress has been rendered structurally impossible.
This lesson is perhaps the most valuable for today's Left which, despite
decades upon decades of evidence to the contrary, continues to give in to
delusions of electoral and legislative potential – just look at what happened
to Bernie Sanders in Iowa, the DNC sabotaged him and his supporters at every
turn when he and his progressive vision threatened to win and upset the
establishment.
As Jackson tells us, "elections and political
parties have no significance when all the serious contenders for public office
are fascist and the electorate is thoroughly misled about the true
nature of the candidates." This applies to candidates from both
capitalist/imperialist parties whom are (knowingly or unknowingly) the products
of carefully-constructed systems of dominance. The point of the Constitution,
Bill of Rights, three branches of government, and all their "checks and
balances" was not to promote and encourage real democracy, a government of
and for the people, but rather to obstruct such a thing, therefore
"protecting the opulent minority from the majority." Within this
arrangement, protest is allowed, voting is allowed, relative free speech is
allowed, and even some forms of civil disobedience are allowed because such
actions can be contained and rendered harmless from a structural point of view.
Thus, fascistic tendencies have been allowed to flourish under the cover of
liberal democracy, evidenced by the fact that any activity which develops as a
true threat to its growth is brutally shut down – once again, think of Wet’suwet’en.
"Fascism has established itself in a most
disguised and efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the
leaders allow us the luxury of a faint protest. Take protest too far, however,
and they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked down in the night and
machine-gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange. The establishment
does everything in its power to ensure that revolutionary rage is redirected
into empty outlets which provide pressure releases for desires that could
become dangerous if allowed to progress…
One has to understand that the fascist arrangement tolerates
the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has programmed into its
very nature a massive, complex and automatic defense mechanism for all our old
methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of
people. The essence of a U.S.A. totalitarian socio-political capitalism is
concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away
its mask. Then the debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle
based on the development of an armed revolutionary culture that will
triumph."
Under bourgeois democracy, elections largely represent
an illusion of choice but still allow for some short-term concessions from the
ruling class, if only as a way to quell inevitable clashes. Since the emergence
of monopoly capital and neoliberalism, elections have become even less
effective, rarely leading to even minor reforms or concessions. In fact,
"with each development in the fascist arrangement," with each vote
for representatives within this arrangement, "the marriage between the
political elite and economic elite becomes more apparent. The integration of
the various sectors of the total economic elite becomes more pronounced."
This natural fusion was never more realized than in the early 20th
century, a time of historic capitalist crisis and political upheaval. Jackson
illustrates the liberal response to the mass desperation that struck America in
the 1930s in particular, ultimately choosing to solidify the capitalist
hierarchy at the expense of the revolutionary moment and the prospects of
radical democracy:
"There was positive mobilization of workers and
the lower class, and a highly developed class consciousness. There was indeed a
very deep economic crisis with attendant strikes, unionizing, lockouts,
break-ins, call-outs of the National Guard. The lower class was threatening to
unite under the pressure of economic disintegration. Revolution was in the air.
Socialist vanguard parties were leading it. There was terrorism from the right
from groups such as Guardians of the Republic, the Black Legion, Peg-leg
White-type storm troopers and hired assassins who carried out the beginnings of
a contra-positive suppressive mobilization. Under the threat of revolution, the
ruling class, true to Marxian theory, became all the more co-optive and
dangerous. F.D.R. was born and bred in this ruling class of families. His role
was to form the first fascist regime, to merge the economic, political and
labor elites. Governing elites/corporative state/fascism - his role was to
limit competition, replace it with the dream of cooperation; to put laissez
faire to rest, and initiate the acceptance of government intervention into
economic affairs."
In discussing the emergence of monopoly capitalism,
Jackson echoed the theoretical developments of Malcolm X by recognizing an
inevitable war between the oppressed of the world and their oppressors:
"To fight effectively, we must be aware of the
fact that the enemy has consolidated through reformist machination the greatest
community of self-interest that has ever existed," Jackson tells us. While
the forces of monopoly capital, white supremacy, and imperialism gained
strength, an "opposite force was also at work, i.e., 'international
socialism' - Lenin's and Fanon's - national wars of liberation guided not by
the national bourgeois but by the people, the ordinary working-class
people."
As capitalism in mature form, fascism can only be
effectively countered by socialism - the development of radical democratic
economies where the people own the means of production and operate them in a
way that benefits all of society, eliminating the brutal competition for basic
human needs for which capitalism has thrived on for so long. And socialism must
develop in a way that represents a formidable attack against the absurd levels
of capitalist brutality we are witnessing, which include an arsenal of weaponry
and resources, and the will to cause mass environmental and human destruction
like never before. In other words, as the default conclusion to capitalism,
fascism can only be countered with deliberate, conscious, and forceful
organizing. Jackson elaborates:
"At its core, fascism is an economic
rearrangement. It is international capitalism's response to the challenge of
international scientific socialism. It developed from nation to nation out of
differing levels of traditionalist capitalism's dilapidation. The common
feature of all instances of fascism is the opposition of a weak socialist
revolution. When the fascist arrangement begins to emerge in any of the independent
nation-states, it does so by default! It is simply an arrangement of an
established capitalist economy, an attempt to renew, perpetuate and legitimize
that economy's rulers by circumflexing and weighing down, diffusing a
revolutionary consciousness pushing from below. Fascism must be seen as an
episodically logical stage in the socio-economic development of capitalism in a
state of crisis. It is the result of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and
miscarried - a consciousness that was compromised."
He went on to say, in a quote that speaks directly to
the people currently standing in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en nation: “We
must establish a true internationalism with other anticolonial peoples. Then we will be on the road of the true
revolutionary. Only then can we expect
to seize the power that is rightfully ours, the power to control the
circumstances of our day-to-day lives.”
Socialism, as a radically democratic system, must
develop from below. It must do so in a way that overcomes the dark forces
created throughout dominant culture by capitalist degradation and alienation.
As a country defined by a racial caste system which has obstructed class
consciousness, we must recognize that any class struggle formed absent a
crucial understanding of white supremacy is doomed to fail. Because, without
recognizing and eliminating these internal divisions rooted in conditioned
fear, the working class will remain a splintered and impotent force against
fascist advancement. Ultimately, ours is a material struggle, but it is one that
has been fortified on a psychological level. Jackson provides crucial insight:
"We are faced with the task of raising a positive
mobilization of revolutionary consciousness in a mass that has "gone
through" a contra-positive, authoritarian process. Racism enters, on the
psycho-social level, in the form of a morbid, traditional fear of both blacks
and revolutions. The resentment of blacks, and conscious or unconscious
tendencies to mete out pain to blacks, throughout the history of Amerika's
slave systems, all came into focus when blacks began the move from South to
North and from countryside to city to compete with whites in industrial
sectors, and, in general, engage in status competition. Resentment, fear,
insecurity, and the usual isolation that is patterned into every modern,
capitalist industrial society (the more complex the products, the greater the
division of labor; the higher the pyramid, the broader its base and the smaller
the individual brick tends to feel) are multiplied by ten when racism, race
antagonism, is also a factor. There is certainly no lack of evidence to prove
the existence of an old and built-in character assassination of programmed
racism (what class controls the nation's educational facilities, prints the
newspapers and magazines that carry the little cartoons, and omits or
misrepresents us to death?) has always served to distract and defuse feelings
of status deprivation suffered by the huge sectors just above the black one.
Then also to account for the seemingly dual nature recognizable in the
authoritarian personality (conformity, but also a strange latent
destructiveness), racism has always been employed as a pressure release for the
psychopathic destructiveness evinced by a people historically processed to
fear, to feel the need for a decision-maker, to hate freedom."
In conclusion, Jackson provided us with an optimistic
call to action just prior to his death in prison, urging the working-class
masses to squash fascistic tendencies and conflicts within our communities,
while keeping our collective eye on the prize - a new society for all people,
built on cooperation and a mutual respect for all life – just like the Wet’suwet’en
land defenders say.
"There must be a collective redirection of the
old guard - the factory and union agitator - with the campus activist who can
counter the ill-effects of fascism at its training site, and with the
lumpenproletariat intellectuals who possess revolutionary scientific-socialist
attitudes to deal with the masses of street people already living outside the
system. They must work toward developing the unity of the pamphlet and the
silenced pistol. Black, brown and white are all victims together. At the end of
this massive collective struggle, we will uncover our new identity, the
unpredictable culmination of the revolutionary process. We will be better
equipped to wage the real struggle, the permanent struggle after the revolution
- the one for new relationships between people."
Understanding the systemic nature of fascism in North
America, while certainly daunting, should not be disheartening. It provides us
with the truth behind the dark days we are witnessing. It allows us to uncover
the roots to our current place in history. And, most importantly, it gives us a
material perspective on where we've been, where we are, and where we're heading
- replacing the hopelessness of confusion with the purposefulness of
understanding. George Jackson is one of many revolutionary prophets who
dedicated his life to passing on the insight needed to take control of our
collective future - a future that will be determined by our conscious,
deliberate actions from this point forward, and ours alone. A future that must
be won through a hardened attack against powerful people guarding centuries-old
systems of oppression. Cowardice, inaction, apathy, and infighting may ultimately
be our downfall, but George Jackson and others like him made sure that
ignorance is not.
As Huey P. Newton said in the eulogy that he delivered
on August 28, 1971, at George Jackson’s funeral at St Augustine’s Episcopal
Church in Oakland California:
George Jackson was my hero. He set a standard for prisoners, for
political prisoners, for people. He
showed the love, the strength, the revolutionary fervor characteristic of any
soldier for the people. He inspired
prisoners, whom I later encountered, to put his ideas into practice and so his
spirit became a living thing. Today I
say that although George’s body has fallen, his spirit goes on, because his
ideas live. And we will see that these
ideas stay alive, because they’ll be manifested in our bodies and in these
young Panthers’ bodies, who are our children.
So it’s a true saying that there will be revolution for one generation
to the next. This was George’s legacy,
and he will go on, he will go on into immortality, because we believe that the
people will win, we know the people will win, as they advance, generation upon
generation…ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE (Revolutionary Suicide,
pg 335).
But even Huey Newton recognized that it was his
brother, Melvin Newton’s, poem that truly captured the spirit of George Jackson.
WE CALLED HIM THE GENERAL
The sky is blue,
Today is clear and sunny.
The house that George once
Lived in headed for the
Grave,
While the Panther spoke
Of the spirit.
I saw a man move catlike
Across the rooftops,
Glide along the horizons,
Casting no shadow,
Only chains into the sea,
Using his calloused hands
And broken feet to
Smash and kick down
Barriers.
The angels say his name
Is George Lester Jackson –
El General.
All the people went home to
Their hovels,
He to the world of gods,
Heroes, tall men, giants.
He went like the rushing
Wind, the rolling tide;
The thunder’s roar,
The lightning’s flash;
Smashing all challengers
And devils in his path,
While caressing the leaves,
Sand and sky.
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