On Thursday, some 200 million workers held a one day general strike in India. This massive day of action was called by 10 trade unions and over 250 farmers organizations and was accompanied by massive protests and a near total shutdown of some Indian states. According to the call put out by unions, the general strike was organized against “the anti-people, anti-worker, anti-national and destructive policies of the BJP government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”
The withdrawal of all “anti-farmer laws and anti-worker labour codes”
The payment of 7,500 rupees in the accounts of each non-tax paying family
Monthly supply of 10 kg of food to needy families
The expansion of the MGNREGS (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005)to include 200 workdays each year, higher wages, and the Act’s extension to urban industries
Stop the “privatisation of the public sector, including the financial sector, and stop corporatisation of government-run manufacturing and service entities like railways, ordnance factories, ports, etc.”
The withdrawal of the “draconian forced premature retirement of government and PSU (public sector) employees”
Pensions for all, the scrapping of the National Pension System and the reimposition of the earlier pension plan with amendments
Workers in nearly all of India’s major industries — including steel, coal, telecommunications, engineering, transportation, ports, and banking — joined the strike. Students, domestic workers, taxi drivers, and other sectors also participated in the nationwide day of action.
In addition to the demands of the nationwide strike, certain sectors made industry-specific demands to fight back against the government’s attacks to their industries that affect the entire working class in India. For example, bank employees are fighting against bank privatization, outsourcing, and for a reduction in service charges and action against big corporate defaults.
Other industries framed their demands in the context of the government’s appalling response to the pandemic and economic crisis hitting India. As the Bombay University and College Teachers’ Union’s statement stated:
This strike is against the devastating health and economic crisis unleashed by COVID-19 and the lockdown on the working people of the country. This has been further aggravated by a series of anti-people legislations on agriculture and the labour code enacted by the central government. Along with these measures, the National Education Policy (NEP) imposed on the nation during the pandemic will further cause irreparable harm to the equity of and access to education.
The general strike occurred in the context of the devastation brought about by the coronavirus pandemic in India. India has more than 9.2 million people infected with Covid-19, the second highest count in the world. Since the pandemic began, nearly 135,000 have died, according to official data. It is likely the numbers are much higher. Added to this are the millions of people who have lost income and who now face increased poverty and hunger, in a country where even before the pandemic 50 percent of all children suffered malnourishment.
The pandemic has spread from major cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, and other urban centers to rural areas where public health care is scarce or non-existent. The Modi government has handled the pandemic by prioritizing the profits of big business and protecting the fortunes of billionaires over protecting the lives and livelihoods of workers.
To stand up against these attacks — many of which began even before the pandemic — farmers and rural workers have been protesting for several months. They joined the national strike this week, staging actions across the country. Small farmers from three major agriculture-based states in India marched all the way to Delhi to protest laws passed by Modi’s government that would allow for larger corporate freedom and industrial farming. They were met with tear gas and brutal repression by the police upon entering Delhi.
The nationalist and right-wing government has used the pandemic to intensify its persecution of Muslims and migrant workers. In New Delhi in April, migrant workers returning home after being stranded by the nation-wide lockdown were brutally hosed down with bleach used to disinfect buses.
Modi has also escalated his nationalist rhetoric, especially against China, in an effort to capitalize on the trade war between the U.S. and China and deepen its strategic and military cooperation with the United States.
In the midst of the misery created by decades of neoliberalism and exacerbated by the pandemic, union leaders called the strike to allow workers to express discontent against the government. This one day strike demonstrated the anger of the working class and unity of farmers, workers and students. However, a one day general strike is not enough to impose all of the ambitious demands put forward by workers and farmers. The working class of India must fight to expand the strike, against the Stalinist-led union leaders of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), who try to reign in the anger of the working class with merely symbolic demonstrations. Without a doubt, this massive coordinated action shows the great potential for unity in action of the Indian working class and farmers. It serves as an inspiration for workers all over the world to use one of our greatest tools against the capitalists: the strike.
This weekend, ten thousand people took to the streets in Guatemala to protest the President and Congress over a proposed budget, the largest in its history, that cuts funds for health care and education as poverty rises, and provides slush funds to politicians and governments. In Colombia, the people held a national strike to protest their violent, right-wing government. In Peru, protests against a right-wing power grab have ousted one appointed president and people are demanding a new government and constitution.
“Our society created the framework for this atrocity just like the trenches of World War I created perfect incubation zones for the 1918 flu,” Truthout’s Kelly Hayes talks with Eric, an organizer with Oakland Abolition and Solidarity about the escalating COVID-19 outbreak at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility, where some imprisoned people have launched a hunger strike over unsafe, unlivable conditions.
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity.Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. I’m your host, Kelly Hayes. By the end of the year, COVID-19 will be the third leading cause of death in the United States. In the wake of Trump’s defeat at the ballot box, people in the U.S. are grappling with the second wave of COVID-19, or in some cases, ignoring the problem and contributing to the spread. Some of us are lucky enough to work at home, while others are forced to mask up, sanitize and do their best to navigate the viral gauntlet. But tragically, some people in the U.S. are not allowed to take even the most minimal precautions to protect themselves from a virus that has already killed more than a million people. The plight of imprisoned people during the pandemic is not a popular discussion right now, but it is an essential one, which is why we will be devoting this episode, and some upcoming episodes, to the COVID-19 crisis in jails, prisons and immigration detention centers, and what we can do about it.
For those of us who are careful, who don’t leave home without a mask and a face shield, who use hand sanitizer every time we touch a surface outside, or who maybe even get our groceries delivered, it might be tough to imagine being trapped in a building where the virus is rampant, trying not to touch anything, knowing you don’t have hand sanitizer or soap. Now, imagine that the building is packed full of people, and a lot of them are sick, and you don’t have a mask. You can’t leave, or even decide where you’re going to stand or rest. The rooms are small and the hallways are narrow, and there is no way to keep your distance. The building is poorly ventilated and there’s black mold all over on the walls, so the longer you’re there, the more you’re hurting your lungs, making yourself more susceptible to the virus. It’s dark, it’s dirty, and you know the virus is hanging in the air and on surfaces throughout the building. People are getting sick. You can see them, you can hear them, but you can’t help them and you can’t leave.
That’s what life is like for people living in jails, detention centers and prisons during this pandemic.
I know a lot of you turn away from discussion of what’s happening in prisons even in the best of times. We have been conditioned to look away and to forget. We have also been conditioned to see ourselves as being different from imprisoned people. I have frequently heard people say, for example, that they don’t approve of the conditions or approve of the practices in U.S. prisons, but that the thing to do is not wind up there. “I wouldn’t do something to wind up in prison,” is something I have heard from people many times. So before we dive into today’s discussion of what’s happening in the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Corcoran, California, I want to say a few words about how we relate to the people inside.
I have no trouble relating to people inside prisons, but I know that’s not everyone. I don’t have any illusions that I am any better than people ensnared by the system. I have broken the law many times over the years, and not always for the sake of justice. I spent the better part of my 20’s grappling with a misdiagnosed mental illness, I was in and out of institutions, and I broke many, many laws. Eventually, I got the right diagnosis and the right medication and things started to change in a big way, but for nearly a decade, there were countless occasions on which I could have been sent to prison for the things I was doing, even though I was mostly only hurting myself. In my 30’s, which are now coming to a close, I have taken a lot of legal risks for the sake of causes I believe in, and I have been very aware of my proximity to incarceration during that time as well. I don’t really see a moral distinction between those different versions of me winding up dead in a cage, but I know the world does. I also know that people tend to exceptionalize activists, as though our criminalization is different, and we’re somehow better than other people who face charges. I believe, for example, that if I staged an act of protest today and went to prison, a lot of people would advocate for me. There would be a #FreeKelly campaign on Twitter, and I am not getting down on that, because I am extremely grateful and please do get me out if they ever come for me — seriously, I will be counting on you all. But please also understand that the Kelly in her mid-20s, who could not function in the world, who could not stop hurting herself, who experienced homelessness, who couldn’t hold down a job, whose mental illness made her hard to deal with — there would have been no campaign to free her, and she deserved to live too. One of my primary struggles during that time was an addiction to heroin. But after getting the right psych meds, it was infinitely easier for me to avoid hard drugs, so I was able to begin the process of rebuilding my life, and twelve years later, here I am, talking to you.
But that very lucky turn of events isn’t how most stories like mine end. Keeley Schenwar, for example, did not get her happy ending. Keeley was the beloved sister of one of my best friends, Maya Schenwar. Keeley was a vibrant, passionate person and she was brave. The stories Maya told me about Keeley when she was in prison and rehab, sticking up for other people who were being bullied or abused, or smuggling an injured animal into the facility to care for it, I felt like I knew her. And when we finally met, and I saw the joy in my friend’s eyes when she was able to put her arm around her sister at a party, in the free world, I thought I was seeing another story like mine — someone who had been kicked around by this world, but who was going to make it. I was so happy for my friend, and happy for Keeley. But it didn’t end that way.
Keeley’s memorial service was the last social event I attended before the pandemic. I watched my friend weep as she talked about Keeley’s love of animals, her kindness, and how brave she was in defending others. Keeley kept trying to get well, but she had been locked up so many times and endured so much violence, from the state, from people and also from the medical system.
There’s a lot of confusion in this country about treatment and care, as they relate to punishment and drug use, and this is especially important now as the Biden administration approaches. One thing Keeley and I agreed on was that what passes for treatment in the U.S. is usually just another form of incarceration. The conflation of punishment with treatment has led to a culture of violence against people criminalized for mental illness and addiction, and that culture manifests itself in many ways. It turns hospitals into prisons, and it sometimes conjures notions of “care” around torture facilities that don’t even attempt treatments of any kind. The California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Corcoran California is one such place. There is no treatment at Corcoran, or CSATF, as it’s often called. It is a brutal prison, through and through. There is also no meaningful activity of any kind for imprisoned people. There are no masks, there is black mold everywhere, there is no way for prisoners to physically distance themselves and COVID-19 is rampant.
We have so much to reckon with in this country, and even those who are inclined to embrace those reckonings may struggle to do so now, with COVID-19 beating down our doors. But we cannot abandon the people in those buildings. Our society created the framework for this atrocity just like the trenches of World War I created perfect incubation zones for the 1918 flu. Our society has built a system of millions of cages, where conditions were already so bad that years were being stripped years off of people’s lives, and we have shuffled people through that system. The United States created a system of disposal that’s now part of a perfect storm. Because while it may feel as though prisons exist in some state of separation from the rest of society, they do not. Guards are vectors, and they very effectively redistribute the disease in our communities. COVID-19 is being manufactured on a grand scale inside jails, prisons and detention centers. In the case of jails, people are being cycled in and out of their communities, causing further spread, but in all facilities, you have guards who are bringing the disease back to their neighbors and communities. In many cases, they are the only vectors.
There are countries that have emptied out entire prisons during this crisis. They didn’t do that because they discovered Mariame Kaba’s work and became prison abolitionists. They did it because they knew they could not afford to create manufacturing centers for the disease.
So these are just some things I want to ask you to think about as we hear from today’s guest, Eric, who is an organizer with Oakland Abolition and Solidarity. Because I know that a lot of you skip over stories about what’s happening in prisons, and you may even distance yourself emotionally from what’s happening inside, but I am asking you not to do that this time. I am asking you to empathize, and if you have trouble imagining yourself in their shoes, or relating to what they’re going through, think about me. Think about Keeley. And ask yourself what must be done, for the sake of the people locked in those cages, and for the sake of your own humanity.
[Musical interlude]
KH: Today’s guest is Eric, who is an organizer with Oakland Abolition and Solidarity in Oakland, California. Oakland Abolition and Solidarity has been providing long term support for people trapped inside the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility, which is the largest prison facility in the state of California. Eric, what can you tell us about what’s happening at the prison?
Eric: Cases at CSATF have been hovering around 500 positive cases for about three weeks. And we know that this is likely a kind of understatement of the crisis for two reasons. Basically one is that [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] CDCR moves cases to the quote “resolved” category after two weeks without retesting people. And the second reason is the rate of false negatives that we know about, even in testing on the outside. The yard in which the outbreak began, D Yard, there are two people on hunger strike, and today will be day 17 of that hunger strike. Toward the beginning of the outbreak, they were very fed up and shocked by the handling of the crisis by the institution. And they decided to take action.
KH: Whenever I talk to people experiencing a particular crisis in a prison, whether it’s a natural disaster or an outbreak of disease, I pretty much always hear that conditions were already very bad, and even potentially deadly, prior to whatever disaster unfolded. Can you tell us a bit about what people in CSATF were already up against?
E: Absolutely. Yeah. So there’s kind of two answers to that one being like the, before COVID “normal,” before this current outbreak. So before COVID, I mean, going back several years, there has been unresolved leaks, across this facility, and that’s something that Oakland Abolition and Solidarity has been tracking for a long time, as well as people’s various attempts to address that situation through grievances and legal means.
So tons of leaking across the facility, the hunger strikers are now housed, they were moved recently. They’re now housed in a leaky facility, and those leaky facilities almost always precipitate black mold. So that’s the kind of before COVID situation. After COVID, and I’ll get to this when I talk about their second demand, a little more, but basically prisons respond to crises by taking stuff away like that is. That is always their go-to solution and often their only solution. So despite the fact that guards are sort of constantly bringing COVID-19 in and out. In fact, in California, they’re like the sort of only possible vector, since visiting has been, there has been no visiting since the very beginning of the pandemic. And across various facilities, people like people have across the system lost access to programming, classes, anything like anything that the state will call rehabilitation, is basically gone down to bare minimum quality of life resources, which after this outbreak started in CSATF, had been curtailed even further.
KH: People talk about comorbidities and how you are more likely to die of COVID-19 if you have diabetes or various disabilities. We know there are many, many disabled and chronically ill people in prison, but the conditions you are describing really create their own potentially fatal vulnerabilities.
E: Yeah, absolutely. You know, before the outbreak, I mean prison in general, but the black mold specifically has basically rendered people immunocompromised across the facility in ways that are likely undiagnosed.
KH: So how are the people who are on hunger strike holding up?
E: Psychologically, remarkably well, sort of maintaining a lot of energy, a lot of regular communication and a lot of. A lot of spirit, a lot of like, they’re feeling the fight in, in a big way. Physically their health is taking a toll they’ve each, at least two of the three have developed a skin condition all over their body, which they attribute more to the poor air in the facility and to the lack of access to showers more than they do to the hunger strike itself. But you know, no doubt, that kind of a toll on the body isn’t helpful. And we know that not eating is likely taking a toll on their immune system. Which is especially scary considering that outbreak.
KH: So we know that a number of groups that are advocating for imprisoned people right now are making demands, and we will have links to some of that work in the show notes of this episode on our website, but I want to ask: what are the specific demands that the prisoners on hunger strike at CSATF are making?
E: The prisoners who were on hunger strike have made three demands of the facility, and then kind of one, one like big statement, which I’ll get to at the end, but these demands are also a helpful lens into what people across the facility are experiencing. So the first demanded universal and voluntary testing. So the institution has, since about the time of the beginning of the hunger strike, about 80 percent of the facility has been tested, but there are two issues with this. One is that people are often not given their own results until up to a week after testing. And two, very often tests are carried out very forcefully and violently, and without the kind of attention to consent that we would associate with like normal, regular medical professionalism. So this has led people across the facility to be sort of reticent to get tested and wary of being forced into circumstances where they’re tested and it’s in this sort of severely uncomfortable way. So this is why it’s like universal access to voluntary testing and not just universal testing, cause we know how these facilities treat or dehumanize people who it’s meant to be treating medically. Another reason this is important is because it’s like that having the information about one’s own status allows people to make actual decisions about their safety, about their distancing practices, about the ways that they engage with other people. The institution has been moving people a lot, around the facility in really, really inexplicable ways and ways that have demonstrably put people at risk and exposed new people to the virus. So people just having the basic knowledge about their own status in order to make those decisions for themselves, or at least to know what their risk level and risk factors are.
So yeah, pretty, pretty bare minimum.
KH: I have heard a lot of reports about that kind of moving around of prisoners you describe. Alan Mills, who’s with the Uptown People’s Law Center told a story on the show in April about how a prisoner in Stateville prison here in Illinois contracted COVID-19, and then somehow frustrated the staff while being quarantined, so they just put him in solitary, which led to everyone who was in solitary at that time contracting the virus. Like, this was an entirely predictable outcome and an undeniable act of violence.
E: Yeah, and so people have no control and often no knowledge of things like that happening.
KH: So what was the second demand that the hunger strikers are making?
E: So demand number two is to restore safe programming. Like we call programming basically anything that happens in prison that’s relatively positive. That’s like not sitting alone in a cell, so classes, rehabilitative activities, quote unquote “sports,” these are things that people have not had access to for a long time, but the sort of issue is beyond that. Like the first step towards safe programming is the restoration of like bare minimum quality of life stuff, like telephone calls with loved ones, regular access to showers and regular access to commissary stores and packages. And the stores and packages are survival necessities specifically because the food situation at CSATF is absolutely egregious. People are getting like tiny silver dollar pancakes and a radish for breakfast, a few crackers and some cheese for lunch, and a boiled potato for dinner. That’s like one little snapshot of a day’s worth of food at CSATF. So people have to, like for survival, supplement their diets with quarterly packages that they can get from families and supporters on the outside, and commissary, neither of which they have had access to for at least a month now.
KH: I don’t think most people who have not been incarcerated, or had a loved one incarcerated, understand the importance of commissary access. Prisons do not give people what they need to stay nourished, they do not give people what they need to stay warm — to even get a tiny fraction of their needs met, prisoners need commissary funds and access.
E: It is so unacceptable and, even when, oh, cleaning supplies, that’s the other thing. That’s one thing that after the hunger strikes started, and after we started to apply some pressure on the outside with phone zaps, we did see some return of access to cleaning supplies. Albeit like really watered down and really sporadic. But that’s another part of their demand that they have basically. And that’s, again, it goes back to like health autonomy, and like the ability of people to like keep themselves safe.
The third demand is mechanisms for transparency. So we’ve talked already about people needing to be informed of their own status when all this testing is happening. CDCR also needs to also be in regular communication with people inside and their families about what is going on about why, like, why these movements are happening.
Like we know that we know that early last week, several people with positive cases were moved into F yard. And they were there for about four hours and then moved out with the officials claiming that it was a mistake for them to have been there. But now there’s a huge outbreak in F facility where, where I know people whose loved ones now are positive for COVID. So no there’s been no accountability and no communication with people on the outside about what’s happening. So CDCR needs to explain these movements. And explain its overall plan for restoring better conditions and getting the outbreak under control. And we think that video visiting is a good way to create some actual transparency and visibility to what’s happening inside. It’s not likely that it’s safe to restore in prison visiting, although that’s an ultimate goal, video visiting will allow people to sort of safely communicate with their loved ones and report what’s happening.
KH: I think so many of us are in a constant state of anxiety. We have our masks, our hand sanitizer, our face shields, we get things delivered when we can, and we are avoiding other people like the plague because we think they might actually have the plague. What do you think those of us who are really caught up in our own fears and anxieties need to understand about how people in prison are experiencing this moment?
E: I think that it’s difficult to imagine how much being in prison can or does ratchet up the kind of paranoia that we’re just getting used to on the outside about the surfaces that we touch, about sanitizing our hands, about the people that we come in contact with. Imagine having no control. Imagine having no ability to be more than six feet away from someone, or no ability to control the amount of people and the sort of status of people that you’re exposed to on a daily basis. And this, in addition to all the other background conditions that we’ve described, so basically to know that you’re in this situation where COVID-19 is everywhere and have zero empowerment to do anything about it and to constantly held in that kind of precarity.
KH: I don’t think most people understand that submersion, that total evacuation of autonomy, and what that means when your environment is barbaric and in a constant state of deterioration.
E: Yeah, absolutely. And it is like, COVID-19 is just another kind of node in this systemic just the, the way that people’s autonomy is like absolutely violated and consistently violated by prison, like COVID-19 is just another aspect of that — like a new way for institutions to keep people scared disempowered and in danger.
KH: So there’s a new administration around the corner, and a lot of us are hopeful that we will finally see a coherent response to COVID-19 from the federal government. But unfortunately, the mass expansion of the prison industrial complex and the torturous conditions of the system were not invented by the Trump administration. The nightmarish system that created a perfect framework for incubating this disease has been a bipartisan project, and Biden and Harris have both been extreme purveyors of carceral violence. While I believe I will have a better chance of not dying of COVID-19 under a Biden administration, I am not sure how quickly anything will change for people inside the prison industrial complex, or if it will. Is there any real discussion among the prisoners about whether Trump’s exit will change anything for them, or are folks just kind of trying to survive the winter?
E: That’s a really good question. I think in a lot of ways people are just trying to survive the winter. I think the biggest danger of moving into a Biden administration is that people will be less apt to pay attention to things like this. And I think like there’s not to my knowledge, any signs of improvement. And I think like what new restrictions and safety measures we see on the outside, like it takes people looking really hard and creating accountability just to make sure they happen at all on the inside. And I think one of the talking points that the hunger strikers have been emphasizing is that if this were any other kind of situation where human beings were in danger, these facilities would be evacuated, would be like absolutely emptied out. Because they’re incubators of COVID-19, because they’re supercharging this pandemic that we’re supposedly contending with and supposedly trying to get rid of prisons, our prisons are amplifying that virus. So the call is to free them all and to evacuate these places. But yeah, there’s that, that often feels a long way off.
KH: It really can. But here, in this moment, I feel like we still have a lot of decisions to make, and that in each of those decisions, there is potential. Like the decision people made to listen to this entire podcast, even though this is a tough subject that they could easily sort of divide from themselves and dismiss. That’s a decision, and that decision might make something else possible, like them looking up y’alls website or checking out the show notes for ways to get involved, or even just reading up more on the subject. We all have so many choices to make that can lead us places, and that can lead us to people, people who share our values, or at least one value — one that’s enough to galvanize us. Because whatever else we all like or don’t like about each other, we are all locked in a battle over what life and death mean. And I think there are so many ways to show up for that fight, and advocating for the people this system is telling you to forget, is a really essential way to do that.
Things are going to get worse before they get better, and we know that, but trauma doesn’t always break people. When people work together to survive a crisis, and to keep other people alive during a crisis, it can strengthen their bonds, and their determination and their values. That could happen. Or we could become more insular, more detached from each other’s fates, and we could wind up setting up the lowest bar imaginable, because Trump, as a point of comparison, makes it very easy to do that. My feeling, in this moment, is that our choices, our organizing, and the things we make and share and build in this moment, will help drive those outcomes. We could come through this winter valuing life more, and valuing each other more, and making bigger demands than ever. We could, as my young friend Bresha Meadows says, “care more and more about what happens to people over time, not less and less.” I really think the way that we handle this crisis is going to dictate so much that comes after. So I am so grateful for everything that you all are doing, Eric, to support imprisoned people who are fighting for themselves right now. And really for all of us, because that’s a fight for all of our humanity.
E: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much for saying that. Yeah, I think, you know where the hope is, is in that notion of collective survival. And like, and we have to, like if we’re going to get through this and like you say, if we’re going to get through this with our humanity, I mean, we have to see people inside as, as us because they are us, and that’s something that so many people are sort of inculturated against. The dividing line between inside and out in this, is this well-maintained political force that, that keeps us from having this kind of solidarity or sense of collective survival. And, and I’m glad to see that there could be hope of breaking that down. And I appreciate you so much, you know, putting, putting this under the, under the magnifying glass.
KH: Well, if you all want to learn more about this struggle and what you can do to support, we are going to have some materials to check out on our website, so please do get involved, in whatever way that you can, and please remember that the crisis we are talking about today is just one of many, and that there is probably a similar crisis playing out at a facility near you. There may already be organizers like Eric, who are already working on it, whose efforts you can join. If not, there are a lot of tools and resources out there to learn from, in terms of how to support people who are trying to survive inside of jails, prisons and detention centers and we will hook you up with as much as we can in the show notes.
Eric, I want to thank you so much for joining us today.
E: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been, it’s been a real pleasure and an honor.
KH: And I want to say to anyone imprisoned in the path of this disease, if you can hear or ready this: we haven’t given up, and we won’t. I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember, that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes
Organizing Resources:
Can you make a call or send an email? Organizers with the Chicago Community Bond Fund are calling on the Cook County State’s Attorney and Chief Judge to take bold action to reduce the number of people incarcerated in Cook County Jail. Current incarceration rates and practices at the facility are putting thousands of people at risk, both in and outside the facility. You can find call-in and email scripts here.
Want to take action? The American Friends Services Committee will be hosting a week of action to #FreeThemAll from December 10 through December 18 with events and actions for people to plug into across the country. Resources will also be available for people who would like to organize their action. You can learn more here.
Breya Johnson, co-chair of Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) in Washington, DC, said her organization enjoys a “working relationship” with the local Black Lives Matter chapter, but views BLM’s national leadership as “more about career interests” and raising money “than it is about Black liberation.” BYP100 sees mutual aid as crucial during the Covid-19-induced economic crisis, “because the government failed us.” “How we keep us safe is critical,” said Johnson, a masters student at George Washington University.
“The struggle has to be more than simply a declaration of our significance as human beings, as in the term ‘Black Lives Matter,’” said Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations. That’s why, for the 12th consecutive year, the Coalition last week marched on the White House under the banners of “Black Power Matters,” “Down With Colonialism,” and “Black Community Control of the Police.” Said Yeshitela: “The masses of people need and want leadership.”
Donald Trump was a test run. Worse than him is coming down the road within the decade. Get busy building.
Movement activists who supported Biden emphasized that his presidency would give the movement breathing room. Okay. We have maybe two years, tops, to prepare for an even more vicious, popular wave of reaction. The next backlash is going to make the Tea Party look like a teddy bear’s picnic.
A Biden administration will enter into government with an even more tenuous majority in the House, a loaded right-wing judiciary, and an intransigent opposition securely ensconced within the “The House of the Undying” i.e. the Senate. This means any hope for progress on the movement’s priorities is dead in the water. Legislative failure will breed resentment (as it did under Obama). And because the left has, during the Trump years especially, become even more structurally, politically, and demographically wedded to the Democratic Party, we will (fairly or unfairly) have to answer for every mistake and insufficiency on behalf of our senior coalition partners.
The lesson the GOP is going to take from this election is that Trumpite politics can garner support from a near-majority of the electorate. Republicans can win larger margins with a fascist program than they will by running a moderate conservative (compare Trump’s narrow loss to those of McCain and Romney). They have every reason to dive deeper into a morass of conspiracy theories, escalate the culture war, and encourage popular violence against the left. Further steps will be to try to consolidate and expand demographic inroads among communities of color, as well as doubling down on voter suppression tactics.
The goal of moving the Democratic Party to the left is a mirage conjured up from the fevered mind of those dying of thirst. There’s absolutely no incentive for the Democrats to embrace a progressive agenda after this election. Why would they? They were barely able to squeak through with a moderate at the top of the ticket. Electorally, the left is a liability for them. There’s no substantial evidence on behalf of the claim that Bernie would have won: it is a fervent wish offered up to the universe, substituting itself for a dispassionate assessment of the balance of forces. The Democrats have perfected the act of housebreaking their internal opposition in a way the Republicans never could. Worse, due to the razor-thin margins likely to be involved going forward, liberal pressure against “spoilers” and dissidents to the neoliberal line will only be ratcheted up from here on out. Don’t vote for the neolib? You’re a traitor.
The left, for its part, has signaled that we are all talk, mere bluster. Our actions indicate that socialists, as well as the entire movement left (unions and Dem-aligned NGOs) are prepared to accept whatever table scraps we’re thrown. 2020 has proven definitively that there’s no chance we will walk away from a bad deal. “Bernie or bust” was a pretense to cover over a disastrous retreat, a rout. The so-called “dirty break” was a huckster’s doodad that fell apart in our hands before we could even complete the purchase.
Until there’s an appetite to accept the social and political consequences of sticking to our guns, the Democrats will continue to drag the left along by the nose. It doesn’t matter if “our ideas are getting an audience” if increased airtime doesn’t result in any significant policy victories. We’re talking about having a decade left to avoid climate catastrophe, and we just kicked the can down the road another four years. If we hold any expectations beyond “changing the discourse,” left electoralism is just as much a dead end as Occupy Wall Street was.
Fascism will not be defeated electorally. Opportunists nod along to this and talk about organizing in the labor movement or mobilizing in the streets. But the meaning of this phrase is much more than just an affirmation of diversity of tactics: it means our current electoral strategies will deliver us into the jaws of fascism.
By propping up the corpse of the Democratic Party, our generation has failed in its historic task. And yet, contradictions that can’t be resolved under a given mode of production have a way of creating new political openings. The institutions of capitalist democracy are utterly resistant to any attempts to reform them, which will mean any successful transformation can be the result of revolution alone. This year has vividly confirmed that the spirit of rebellion among the dispossessed is alive and well.
Revolutionaries, even if few in number, must resolve “to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses” (Lenin). We will be at great pains to avoid the easy path of allowing socialism to be absorbed into bourgeois politics and converted into just another “pressure group” among others, but we must also also take care not to become completely aloof from the class, always remembering that we “have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole” (Marx & Engels).
We must take reality as our starting point, even if it is a reality that is anathema to us. The reality is that with every election, the working class becomes more deeply ensnared in a trap whose cables draw around us tighter with our every struggle. But we are not yet ready to cut loose; we are not yet fit to rule. A longer period of patient education is necessary.
In order to prepare the working class to govern, the ultimate goal (communism) and the most effective means (revolutionary strategy) must not be dispensed with on account of their momentary discomfiture. A vigorous rejection of class collaboration, and an insistence that the proletariat can only exercise power through the political form of the commune — these are indispensable points. We cannot lie to the people about the road ahead, nor its difficulties.
If we were to truly grasp these ideas, our enthusiasm to go among the masses, to organize, and to propagate socialism will be unmatched. And we must. Because it is only when the working class and the oppressed have taken up socialism as the ideological expression of their own emancipation will there be any hope of turning rebellion into revolution, and revolution into victory.
“To accomplish universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism.”
The recent rebellion in Philly against the police murder of Walter Wallace Jr. is rooted in struggles of the past and reflects the uprisings of the future.
This summer we took part in a rebellion across the country against racism and police brutality. Now, the nationwide scope of protest has diminished. However, since then we’ve seen more localized rebellions in Kenosha, and Chicago around the shooting of Latrell Allen, and around the release of the video in Rochester. Philly is the most recent. In that context, what’s going on with Philly?
The past weeks in Philly we have seen pretty significant rebellions around the police murder of Walter Wallace, about five blocks west of where I join you from. It’s important to understand that Philadelphia saw some of the most militant reactions nationwide to the killing of George Floyd. There was mass rebellion in Philadelphia that lasted several days and in June the National Guard was here.
This all takes place in the backdrop of a much longer shift in radical politics in the city, which goes back to around 2015, though it’s also bound up with much longer trajectory. We’re talking about a small group of organizers who were out there trying to raise hell around the police killing of Brandon Tate-Brown in late 2014 and 2015. As Ferguson and Baltimore were popping off we in Philly were struggling over this one particular case.
The militancy of those struggles, even if they were relatively small scale, really broke open the city, which has been a city of long-term resistance, a city in which Black struggles have been crucial, in which brutality and mass murder by the police, like in the case of the MOVE bombing, have been essential to understanding the political context.
In a way, Philly was primed to respond to the killing of George Floyd, and it did. I’ve never seen anything like what we saw in Philly on May 30th and into June. Not even during the Oscar Grant rebellions in Oakland—which was where I cut my teeth politically—did I see that scale of rebellion, looting, and mass resistance.
Now what’s happening today is interesting because it’s obviously more localized. We’re seeing a city and a population that’s really just had enough, that has a level of clarity around what the police do, that knows perfectly well that we don’t need to even entertain the lies about “Did he have a knife?” or that the police were just trying to do their job and keep people safe. We know that’s not true.
We know that police are trained cowards, who are taught from day one to put their life above anyone else’s life. This is why they shot and killed Walter Wallace. He was on a block full of people—neighbors, family members, none of them were trying to kill him because they didn’t think he was that big of a risk to their well-being. It was the police who decided to kill him, to fire fourteen shots.
We know that police are trained cowards.
You are seeing in the city that people just don’t buy the bullshit anymore, and they’re buying it less and less by the day. While the first night of protest we saw that the police were restrained by the police commissioner, who took a political beating back in June over the use of force, the use of teargas, rubber bullets, and extreme levels of brutality, they weren’t going be held back forever. They came back on the second night and really just beat the piss out of people for fun, because this is what the pigs do.
They thought they would get away with it like they always get away with it. But, as you probably have seen, there’s now a viral video of them smashing the windows out of a car, beating the passengers, and tearing a two-year-old child out of the arms of his mother. They then tried to take credit for rescuing him, saying that he was found wandering barefoot, which is an absolute lie. And then everyone saw the truth revealed, which is further confirmation of the embarrassment that the police represent, and that they are really just lying thugs who are out to protect themselves and no one else.
This, as a lot of other people have pointed out, is a deeply white supremacist and colonial idea that says: “The people that I’m brutalizing, I’m actually rescuing them. This baby whose windows I smashed out, who I stole away from his mother, I’m actually here to protect him.”
This is the veneer that policing has always had. No matter how bad the violence that is inflicted by the police on communities, they’re told they just need more police, and the police are really there to protect them. Policing is a form of psychological and physical abuse. And people really are just not buying it anymore.
What do you think has led to that level of clarity? I ask because in varying ways around the country, we’ve seen a shift towards people talking about defunding and even abolishing the police, seeing the institution as a problem in itself, not as something to reform. So in Philly, like you said, people have had enough and there’s this clarity. What do you think has led to that? Is it the ongoing organizing? Is it the national radicalization? Is it just people seeing it?
The first thing is that we live in a moment of global revolt and rebellion. This has been going on for well over a decade in the United States. I think the uprisings in Oakland in 2009 really helped kick things off, the Occupy movement followed just a couple years later, Black Lives Matter a couple years after that. You have this escalating spiral of struggles across the country, pin-balling around, and people are becoming more radical and they’re developing a better understanding of theory and seeing more of the way that theory plays out in practice.
They’re seeing that they have power in the streets, they’re seeing that struggles lead to actual change and transformation. This is all the context of what we now see occurring amid a devastating economic crisis and the continued impoverishment of not only poor communities of color, but also the indebtedness of students and the absence of a horizon of how to get out of this situation. This is the generation leading the George Floyd revolts, who are nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years old. They have grown up with nothing but Black death at the hands of police, economic crisis, no options, and no future. The fact that they are rebelling should not surprise us.
These spirals of struggle move across the country, radicalize here and there, and bring us up to the level that we’ve reached. You can see this in the words of Kandace Montgomery, an abolitionist organizer with the Black Visions Collective in Minneapolis who said: “In 2015 [when Jamar Clarke was killed] . . . we were clear about the problem. Now we are clear about the solution.” This is why you have this really astounding uniformity of calls to abolish, or at the very least defund, the police. These calls are not brand new—they’ve been emerging over the past few years, but the fact that this is what people are reaching for in this moment of struggle says a lot about the level of consciousness that’s developed over the past ten years.
We just had a national presidential election that offered a choice between an openly racist president and a more veiled racist vice president in Joe Biden, who campaigned on a law and order, shoot-them-in-the leg version of police reform. So those are the choices, and there’s rebellion in Philadelphia where there’s still a National Guard presence and where the Democratic mayor only just lifted a curfew. What does all this say about the current political situation and context both in Philly and nationally?
When Gramsci talks about a time of monsters, this is what he’s talking about. While I’m not even a Bernie stan, it’s clear that we could have had a Bernie. Instead, who do we get in the context of mass, nationwide anti-police rebellion? A segregationist and a cop. This was the Democratic ticket.
This is a time of monsters because it’s a moment in which we know which way history is pointing, but on some level that path is blocked. Now, while it’s blocked on the level of formal politics, it’s not blocked in the streets. In the streets, things are moving forward by leaps and bounds, and I think that’s precisely what matters.
These struggles will explode no matter who is in power. There are ways that having Trump in power sets off struggles by drawing more left-liberals into struggle and radicalizing them to play a crucial role in a growing coalition of resistance. But there are ways that when Obama was in power, for example, we had the eruption of Black Lives Matter because of the dashed hopes and the crushed expectations. Nothing is going to change under Joe Biden; nothing would really change under Donald Trump. So that collision with reality has a shocking and radicalizing effect on people who realize that there’s nothing left but the streets.
We know that in 2021, police murder is going to be the story, and we know that because it is an old story. If you look at the history of mass resistance in this country, that resistance is almost always driven by Black and brown people, almost always against the police, almost always sparked by police murder. Why? Because the police are founded on that great betrayal of the Black struggle by poor whites at the end of slavery, those who chose the Klan instead of multiracial equality. Instead of abolition-democracy, they opted for white terror.
So we should not be surprised that now, more than 150 years later, we’re looking at the same forces playing out in the same way, because these are historical questions that we haven’t yet dealt with.
You mentioned a continuity of organizing in Philly. What would you say about the connection between what’s going on currently and the struggle around MOVE? Of course, the MOVE house was about four blocks from the shooting of Walter Wallace.
The MOVE struggle and the struggle around Mumia, not to mention other struggles like the struggle for freedom for Russell Maroon Shoatz, are essential to understanding the political landscape in Philadelphia. They’ve provided it with a radical backbone that leans toward two opposing poles. One is a level of kind of mass fear. It was just in 1985 when the City of Philadelphia dropped a bomb on West Philly, killed scores of people, and burned down the city block. That’s not that long ago; everyone remembers it. Even when I moved to Philly a decade ago and started organizing, people were like, “Thank you for doing this, this is amazing. But you’re all gonna get yourselves killed.” That fear is deeply embedded in the psyche. At the same time the recognition of what the police in the city actually stand for is undeniable.
And so you have a situation that gives rise to a willingness to engage in mass resistance. There are lots of material dynamics that play into this: who’s in charge, how it’s played out, and the way that these struggles are able to coalesce. You can see an escalating spiral beginning with struggles around Brandon Tate-Brown, in which small groups of people were constantly in the streets, constantly confronting the police commissioner. Bear in mind that this was Charles Ramsey, Obama’s top cop, the person in charge of the twenty-first-century policing reform report, who advocated civilian oversight and transparency but wouldn’t even tell us who killed Brandon Tate-Brown, who wouldn’t even give us that basic level information, wouldn’t release the video until we fought in the streets to get that, and until we frankly embarrassed him.
These are the cycles, the spirals of struggle. Around the same time, we had a solidarity rally with the Baltimore rebellion. That was the biggest thing Philly had seen in a decade. Thousands of people showed up, took over the streets, blocked the highway, and fought the police. They realized that what’s happening in Baltimore was exactly the same thing, essentially it is Philly’s twin city, and so we see it happen here, we see it happen there.
There were Black cops in 1890 and it didn’t make a difference.
The years since have seen just a consistency to this struggle, not just for demands for a better way of living and for equality, but a struggle against this consistency of police brutality. Philly, we should bear in mind, is a place that had an integrated police force in the 1890s. Du Bois wrote about this. There were Black cops in 1890 and it didn’t make a difference. There was so-called community policing in the 1940s and 1950s, and it didn’t make a difference.
I feel the realization that radical change is necessary is deeply embedded in the psyche of the city of Philadelphia.
So one of the strategic orientations that came out of the past wave of Black Lives Matter organizing is electing progressive prosecutors. Philly has Larry Krasner, who I think is considered one of the best examples of that. What is Krasner doing in this current rebellion and how has he oriented himself?
Absolutely nothing. Dead silence. I think it’s not hard to figure out why Larry Krasner won’t say anything about this until after the election. And even then, I’m not sure what he will say. He’s been very willing in recent weeks to assume a radical anti-Trump stance and to say he’ll prosecute people who show up at the polls to intimidate voters, and that’s fine. But there’s been dead silence on Walter Wallace. I say this as someone who’s pretty balanced in the sense that I think it’s good thing that Larry Krasner is in the DA’s office. We’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of people not sitting in jail as a result of that election, and we’ve seen important experiments in diversion and other strategies for keeping people out of prison, for not arresting people for certain crimes, and for decriminalization. These things are hugely important.
On the material level of movements, it’s been crucially important that, for example, when Occupy ICE was happening, all the people who were arrested were released within two hours with only citations. This is materially important for our movements and has made a huge difference. So I don’t think it’s about denouncing the district attorney. Though Krasner is also someone who’s sending people to jail and who’s not taking a strong enough position when it comes to people like Mumia. What we need to be thinking about is how to operate in a context in which things are getting easier in a certain way, but when it comes to the George Floyd rebellions, for example, the district attorney’s office is insisting on drawing a hard line between protestors and looters and prosecuting looters and releasing protestors. This is a division that, especially if we care about class unity and the unity of this class struggle, we have to refuse 100 percent.
But I think the question is less do we like or dislike Larry Krasner than it is: what does his presence in the DA’s office mean for people? Moving forward we need to push to have all charges dropped from May and June, and there may be some leverage for that after the presidential election.
Looting in Philly and elsewhere, like in Chicago, has been a major, divisive political question in which liberals want to divide the “good protestors” from the “bad protestors”, and people want to say, “Oh, that’s not the protest.” We at Rampant have written about this quite a bit as far as the viability and necessity of defending looting as a political tactic. What do you think the left should say around this specific question and what’s at stake?
I think a lot is at stake. The first thing I’ll say is the same thing I would say around debates around property destruction and violence in general as a tactic. There are certain people who approach social movements on the assumption that if they don’t want these tactics and they win the argument about them they’ll go away.
The reality is people are going to loot. In moments of mass uprising people are going to take things. We are obligated to start from an understanding that that’s going to happen regardless. It’s not like we can make it go away. And yet there are those people who say, “Well, looting makes us look really bad.” Well no, once we start from the understanding that it’s inevitable, a force of nature, you realize that what makes you look bad is not looting. What makes it look bad is losing an argument about whether or not this is something that should happen.
What makes it look bad is when people within the movement are denouncing other people for looting. This is what makes us lose these debates. However, if people stood together and said, “You know what? We’re not going to criticize people who are engaged in certain tactics during these moments of mass uprising in which our concern is the murder of this Black man.” And at that point, the debate goes away. The media of course will still run with it, and they’ll try to discredit people and the movement, but it doesn’t have the same effect.
People are managing the narrative pretty well in the movements now where people are correctly pointing out that Walmart doesn’t belong to us, Best Buy doesn’t belong to us. These big box stores are part of an oppressive capitalist system, and we know that they are stealing from us and stealing people’s labor every day. We shouldn’t give a shit about whether or not they’re looted and could even say that the direct redistribution of goods from them is probably a good thing in this context, under a pandemic, when people are not working and can’t access those things.
The debate does get a little more complex on 52nd Street, two blocks away from here, where some small stores were looted. If you ask people on the block, you hear very different opinions. On one hand, that’s a neighborhood store, it’s owned by this or that person. On the other hand, people will say, “I don’t know who that person is. I know that they racially profile me when I go in there.” And people will ask if those resources are really being dedicated to the community? These are complicated debates.
But the idea that there’s a uniform response to those debates within poor communities of color is just not true. What needs to happen and what does happen are people negotiating these questions in the streets and within movements, when people, for example, try to alert people to locations that should be left alone.
You know, there was an Indigenous youth center in Minneapolis that got smashed up during the rebellions. That didn’t lead people to denounce the looters, but it did lead to them to say, “No, let’s not do this. We’ll have a fundraiser,” and the America Indian Movement engaged in community patrols to help keep an eye on people’s safety.
Dealing with these things within movements is possible and necessary. But the main danger of course—that’s being actively stoked by the police, by the state, and its spokespeople—is that it is used to divide the movement. This has been incredibly dangerous, and in some cases, very effective.
You talked about the radicalization and cycles of resistance moving in leaps and bounds, particularly now. What do you see as the next jump? What’s the way forward, and what do we have to do?
These struggles have been, as everyone knows, popping off everywhere. One of the defining features of the George Floyd rebellions was their contagious ability to spread to the point where we see statues of colonizers being torn down in England as a result. One thing that is undeniably true about the history of Black struggles against the police in the United States is that you don’t know what’s going to set it off. There are all these structural reasons why this was a tinderbox ready to explode. But you never know when the explosion’s going to happen.
It’s going to be an incredibly dangerous time as the old world dies.
We do know that the powder and the spark are even more available today. In January when Joe Biden is in office he’s not going to do a fucking thing to change this deep-seated reality. We know that the history of police reform is the history of reforming the image of the police, not what they actually do. And we know that there is no way to reform away the actual function of the police, which is a repressive, brutal function. That is inevitable, and under this system it’s going to continue.
This continuity is the backdrop to a situation in which people’s lives aren’t getting better, in which there’s a continuing pandemic, and the economic crisis is deepening. People are ready to go at the drop of a hat. We’re going to see an escalation of these struggles, and that’s a good thing.
We also know that the far right is going to be engaging in organized and sporadic violence. It’s going to be an incredibly dangerous time as the old world dies.
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Post and Grant Avenues looking northeast after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 (credit: 
