Dérive

George Jackson was murdered by prison guards on August 21, 1971. Half a century later, his story deserves to be known by a new generation of activists. Jackson was born on September 23, 1941, in Chicago. He was raised by a loving mother and father, and given particular attention by his grandfather, George “Papa” Davis. But at age 15, Jackson was imprisoned at a youth facility in California after several juvenile convictions. “Capture, imprisonment, is the closest to being dead that one is likely to experience in this life,” Jackson later wrote in his book Soledad Brother . “When told to do something, I simply played the idiot and spent my time reading. The absentminded bookworm, I was in full revolt by the time seven months were up.” At age 18, Jackson was convicted on dubious evidence of a gas station robbery of $70. “I was captured and brought to prison when I was 18 years old because I couldn’t adjust,” he would later write. ...

    (Patrice Lamumba, age 35, 1960) "In Katanga, it is said that a giant fell in the night. And the water that falls from the heavens, from the forehead, the water that falls from the eyes, the water that flows into the river, the colour of tea, all these waters cry plaintively where death has the face of a giant...It was a giant, my mother, a giant who fell that night, that night in Katanga." Directed by Raoul Peck, Lumumba: La mort du proph éte ( Lumumba: Death of a Prophet ) is a 1990 french film about the life and death of Congolese president and freedom fighter Patrice Lumumba. Peck, born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1953, also directed I Am Not Your Negro (2016) , The Young Karl Marx (2017), and the feature-length film Lumumba (2000). Fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship, Peck and his family moved to the newly established Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1960, the same year a 35-year-old Lumumba won the country's first election since independence from Belgi...

(Freedom Summer activists sing before leaving for Mississippi in June of 1964).  "A generation ago, Mississippi was a state like no other. Its blacks were free in name only, second class citizens in a system unchanged since the turn of the century."  Freedom on my Mind (1994) is a wonderful documentary about the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, starting with events in 1960, and ending with the disillusion of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The stories of dozens of activists (some well-know, others forgotten) and reals of archival footage create a powerful story about racism, the civil rights movement, the dead-end of electoral politics, and the seeds of the Black Power movement and uprisings across the latter half of the decade. The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in 1865. In response, Mississippi becomes the first of the former Confederate states to enact laws (Black Codes) limiting the rights of blacks. Other Southern states followed, and th...

  (the boss needs you, you don't need him) “The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive… compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.” - Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967.  "On Wednesday the undertakers went on strike. Now is not the time to die."  - Eyewitness to mass strike on May 14, 1968. "The crisis was infinitely more serious and profound...it was not my position that was in question, it was general de Gaulle, the Fifth Republic, and, to a considerable extent, Republican rule itself." - Prime minister Georges Popidou, May 25, 1968. "May ’68 was the biggest mass upheaval in the history of France and the concurrent wildcat general strike was the most important strike in the history of the European workers movement since World War Two. Nowhere else was the rejection of the new model of consumerist life more profound, or...

  I believe in living. I believe in the spectrum of Beta days and Gamma people. I believe in sunshine. In windmills and waterfalls, tricycles and rocking chairs. And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts. And sprouts grow into trees. I believe in the magic of the hands. And in the wisdom of the eyes. I believe in rain and tears. And in the blood of infinity. DDD I believe in life. And i have seen the death parade march through the torso of the earth, sculpting mud bodies in its path. I have seen the destruction of the daylight, and seen bloodthirsty maggots prayed to and saluted. DDD I have seen the kind become the blind and the blind become the bind in one easy lesson. I have walked on cut glass. I have eaten crow and blunder bread and breathed the stench of indifference. DDD I have been locked by the lawless. Handcuffed by the haters. Gagged by the greedy. And, if i know any thing at all, it’s that a wall is jus...

  When history is written as it aught to, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity. - C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins I have seen the destruction of the daylight / and seen bloodthirsty maggots / prayed to and saluted. - Assata Shakur, Affirmation  Every revolution is accompanied by anger. Anger does not necessarily make one blind. It is also active and temporary. Hatred, by contrast, continues to fester. When anger breaks out, one still has time to reflect —  sine ira cum studio  — otherwise one would be tainted by that so easily corruptible hate. Hate is a corrupt affect when it does not transform into the clarity of anger. Hatred loses its clear head and for that reason does not belong in the class struggle. It never finds its correct addressee. - Ernst Bloch on anger and hatred I told him him to leave and that it's not right to shoot people from our house. Of course, ...

  "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen J. Gould, The Panda's Thumb I have a distinct curiosity for each person I see on the street. Some live in tents, some sleep in the open, some under awnings and sun under direct sun. Some talk to no one in particular, others have no words. They exist in various states of decay. Some farther, some closer to death.

"She closed the door again and sat down to wait for the end. The disintegration went on, accompanied by horrible cracks and rumbling. The valves that restrained the Medical Apparatus must have weakened, for it ruptured and hung hideously from the ceiling. The floor heaved and fell and flung her from the chair. A tube oozed towards her serpent fashion. And at last the final horror approached - light began to ebb, and she knew that civilization's long day was closing."  - E. M. Forster,  The Machine Stops I'm resting my head on the air conditioning machine as I write these words. Inside it's a tolerable 65 degrees. The machine emits a constant hum, the settings on "cool" and "high." With these machines I can shape the tiny bubble around me. Outside it's a more stupefying 95. Thursday it will be 97. I'm told in bright orange characters of an excessive heat warning for the Los Angeles area. "Impacts," the warning re...

  A march by supporters of the Cordones Industriales in the Chilean capital of Santiago (1970).  What can we learn from the past? Over the next several months I'll be talking with a friend about the book Revolutionary Rehearsals, edited by Colin Barker.  The synopsis reads: "Five times in the last 35 years, the working class has posed a radical alternative to the status quo. Although none of these struggles ultimately achieved their goals, they were 'revolutionary rehearsals' that hold important lessons about the struggle for socialism under modern conditions." I'll make five separate posts sharing my notes and our thoughts about the five revolutionary rehearsals examined in the book - France 1968, Chile 1972, Portugal 1974, Iran 1979, and Poland 1980.