THE HANDSTAND |
AUGUST-OCTOBER2009
|
GEORGE JACKSON:
BLACK REVOLUTIONARY
By Walter Rodney, November 1971
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/477.html
To most readers in this continent, starved of authentic
information by the imperialist news agencies, the name of
George Jackson is either unfamiliar or just a name. The
powers that be in the United States put forward the
official version that George Jackson was a dangerous
criminal kept in maximum security in Americas toughest
jails and still capable of killing a guard at Soledad
Prison. They say that he himself was killed attempting
escape this year in August. Official versions given by
the United States of everything from the Bay of Pigs in
Cuba to the Bay of Tonkin in Vietnam have the common
characteristic of standing truth on its head. George
Jackson was jailed ostensibly for stealing 70 dollars. He
was given a sentence of one year to life because he was
black, and he was kept incarcerated for years under the
most dehumanizing conditions because he discovered that
blackness need not be a badge of servility but rather
could be a banner for uncompromising revolutionary
struggle. He was murdered because he was doing too much
to pass this attitude on to fellow prisoners. George
Jackson was political prisoner and a black freedom
fighter. He died at the hands of the enemy.
Once it is made known that George Jackson was a black
revolutionary in the white mans jails, at least one point
is established, since we are familiar with the fact that
a significant proportion of African nationalist leaders
graduated from colonialist prisons, and right now the
jails of South Africa hold captive some of the best of
our brothers in that part of the continent. Furthermore,
there is some considerable awareness that ever since the
days of slavery the U.S.A. is nothing but a vast prison
as far as African descendants are concerned. Within this
prison, black life is cheap, so it should be no surprise
that George Jackson was murdered by the San Quentin
prison authorities who are responsible to Americas chief
prison warder, Richard Nixon. What remains is to go
beyond the generalities and to understand the most
significant elements attaching to George Jacksons life
and death.
When he was killed in August this year, George Jackson
was twenty nine years of age and had spent the last
fifteen [correction: 11 years] behind barsseven of
these in special isolation. As he himself put it, he was
from the lumpen. He was not part of the regular producer
force of workers and peasants. Being cut off from the
system of production, lumpen elements in the past rarely
understood the society which victimized them and were not
to be counted upon to take organized revolutionary steps
within capitalist society. Indeed, the very term lumpen
proletariat was originally intended to convey the
inferiority of this sector as compared with the authentic
working class.
Yet George Jackson, like Malcolm X before him, educated
himself painfully behind prison bars to the point where
his clear vision of historical and contemporary reality
and his ability to communicate his perspective frightened
the U.S. power structure into physically liquidating him.
Jacksons survival for so many years in vicious jails, his
self-education, and his publication of Soledad Brother
were tremendous personal achievements, and in addition
they offer on interesting insight into the revolutionary
potential of the black mass in the U.S.A., so many of
whom have been reduced to the status of lumpen.
Under capitalism, the worker is exploited through the
alienation of part of the product of his labour. For the
African peasant, the exploitation is effected through
manipulation of the price of the crops which he laboured
to produce. Yet, work has always been rated higher than
unemployment, for the obvious reason that survival
depends upon the ability to obtain work. Thus, early in
the history of industrialization, workers coined the
slogan the right to work. Masses of black people in the U.S.A.
are deprived of this basic right. At best they live in a
limbo of uncertainty as casual workers, last to be hired
and first to be fired. The line between the unemployed or
criminals cannot be dismissed as white lumpen in
capitalist Europe were usually dismissed.
The latter were considered as misfits and regular toilers
served as the vanguard. The thirty-odd million black
people in the U.S.A. are not misfits. They are the most
oppressed and the most threatened as far as survival is
concerned. The greatness of George Jackson is that he
served as a dynamic spokesman for the most wretched among
the oppressed, and he was in the vanguard of the most
dangerous front of struggle.
Jail is hardly an arena in which one would imagine that
guerrilla warfare would take place. Yet, it is on this
most disadvantaged of terrains that blacks have displayed
the guts to wage a war for dignity and freedom. In
Soledad Brother, George Jackson movingly reveals the
nature of this struggle as it has evolved over the last
few years. Some of the more recent episodes in the
struggle at San Quentin prison are worth recording. On
February 27th this year, black and brown (Mexican)
prisoners announced the formation of a Third World
Coalition. This came in the wake of such organizations as
a Black Panther Branch at San Quentin and the
establishment of SATE (Self-Advancement Through Education).
This level of mobilisation of the nonwhite prisoners was
resented and feared by white guards and some racist white
prisoners. The latter formed themselves into a self-declared
Nazi group, and months of violent incidents followed.
Needless to say, with white authority on the side of the
Nazis, Afro and Mexican brothers had a very hard time.
George Jackson is not the only casualty on the side of
the blacks. But their unity was maintained, and a
majority of white prisoners either refused to support the
Nazis or denounced them. So, even within prison walls the
first principle to be observed was unity in struggle.
Once the most oppressed had taken the initiative, then
they could win allies.
The struggle within the jails is having wider and wider
repercussions every day. Firstly, it is creating true
revolutionary cadres out of more and more lumpen. This is
particularly true in the jails of California, but the
movement is making its impact felt everywhere from
Baltimore to Texas. Brothers inside are writing poetry,
essays and letters which strip white capitalist America
naked. Like the Soledad Brothers, they have come to learn
that sociology books call us antisocial and brand us
criminals, when actually the criminals are in the social
register. The names of those who rule America are all in
the social register.
Secondly, it is solidifying the black community in a
remarkable way. Petty bourgeois blacks also feel
threatened by the manic police, judges and prison
officers. Black intellectuals who used to be completely
alienated from any form of struggle except their personal
hustle now recognize the need to ally with and take their
bearings from the street forces of the black unemployed,
ghetto dwellers and prison inmates.
Thirdly, the courage of black prisoners has elicited a
response from white America. The small band of white
revolutionaries has taken a positive stand. The
Weathermen decried Jacksons murder by placing a few bombs
in given places and the Communist Party supported the
demand by the black prisoners and the Black Panther Party
that the murder was to be investigated. On a more general
note, white liberal America has been disturbed. The white
liberals never like to be told that white capitalist
society is too rotten to be reformed. Even the
established capitalist press has come out with esposes of
prison conditions, and the fascist massacres of black
prisoners at Attica prison recently brought Senator
Muskie out with a cry of enough.
Fourthly (and for our purposes most significantly) the
efforts of black prisoners and blacks in America as a
whole have had international repercussions. The framed
charges brought against Black Panther leaders and against
Angela Davis have been denounced in many parts of the
world. Committees of defense and solidarity have been
formed in places as far as Havana and Leipzig. OPAAL
declared August 18th as the day of international
solidarity with Afro-Americans; and significantly most of
their propaganda for this purpose ended with a call to
Free All Political Prisoners.
For more than a decade now, peoples liberation movements
in Vietnam, Cuba, Southern Africa, etc., have held
conversations with militants and progressives in the U.S.A.
pointing to the duality and respective responsibilities
of struggle within the imperialist camp. The revolution
in the exploited colonies and neo-colonies has as its
objective the expulsion of the imperialists: the
revolution in the metropolis is to transform the
capitalist relations of production in the countries of
their origin. Since the U.S.A. is the overlord of world
imperialism, it has been common to portray any
progressive movement there as operating within the belly
of the beast. Inside an isolation block in Soledad or San
Quentin prisons, this was not merely a figurative
expression. George Jackson knew well what it meant to
seek for heightened socialist and humanist consciousness
inside the belly of the white imperialist beast.
International solidarity grows out of struggle in
different localities. This is the truth so profoundly and
simply expressed by Che Guevara when he called for the
creation of one, two, three - many Vietnams. It has long
been recognized that the white working class in the U.S.A
is historically incapable of participating (as a class)
in anti-imperialist struggle. White racism and Americas
leading role in world imperialism transformed organized
labour in the U.S. into a reactionary force. Conversely,
the black struggle is internationally significant because
it unmasks the barbarous social relations of capitalism
and places the enemy on the defensive on his own home
ground. This is amply illustrated in the political
process which involved the three Soledad
BrothersGeorge Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John
Clutchetteas well as Angela Davis and a host of
other blacks now behind prison bars in the U.S.A.
NOTE: George Jackson also authored Blood In My Eye
which was published posthumously, or after this article
was written.
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org Questions
and comments may be sent to claude@freedomarchives.org
|