This book is a short one but as you can see, its contents are packed and the book is currently free of charge to get, so go for it:

- “Fighting to Win” from Full Spectrum Resistance: Building Movements and Fighting to Win by Aric McBay (2019)

- “The Problem is Civil Obedience” from The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy, Updated and Expanded 2nd Edition by Howard Zinn (2009)

- “Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison” from Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis (2005)

- “Women in Prison: How We Are” by Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard), 1978, from Voices of a People’s History of the United States, 10th Anniversary Edition, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove (2014)

- “We Remember the Days of Glory but Tend to Forget They Were Fourteen-Hour Days” from ’68: The Mexican Autumn of the Tlatelolco Massacre by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (2019)

- “Even Liars Know the Truth” from ’68: The Mexican Autumn of the Tlatelolco Massacre by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (2019)

- “Prison, Where Is Thy Victory?: January 3, 1970” by Huey P. Newton (1969), from The New Huey P. Newton Reader, edited by David Hilliard and Donald Weise (2020)”

https://sevenstories.com/books/4260-against-police-violence

The contents of the book are essentially culled from other publications from Seven Stories Press, so go get 'em! Honestly, I don't know how many I've bought from them over several years. I even visited them at their locale in New York City.

Anyway, here be quotes that show how useful and necessary this publisher and its writers are:

“Fighting to Win” from Full Spectrum Resistance: Building Movements and Fighting to Win by Aric McBay

In 1961, a Black student, James Meredith, applied to the all-white University of Mississippi. He was not granted entry. He and his lawyers began a series of legal challenges alleging that Meredith was rejected because of the color of his skin. The case made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the university had to accept Meredith. But again, the state establishment defied the Supreme Court. Indeed, the governor of Mississippi personally came to turn Meredith away when he attempted to visit the registrar’s office. Federal marshals were sent to escort Meredith and ensure his safety. When James Meredith was finally able to enroll in the fall of 1962, there was an immediate and violent response on the university campus. Students and Mississippians rioted by the thousand, attacking the hundreds of federal marshals and border guards tasked with protecting Meredith. In response, President Kennedy sent in sixteen thousand federal troops to quell the racist uprising. Swathes of the campus were burned or destroyed by the rioters. (One military police officer, a veteran of the war in Vietnam, said he preferred being in Vietnam to dealing with the rioters.) When the riots were over, two people were dead, twenty-eight US marshals had been shot, and 160 soldiers had been injured. Some called it “the last battle of the Civil War.” (Meredith himself was safe, though in 1966 he was shot in an assassination attempt. He would recover.)

Members of the KKK were willing to kill people, but they were afraid to die themselves. Robert F. Williams, an organizer who was kicked out of the NAACP for advocating Black self-defense, explained this in his 1962 book Negroes with Guns. He wrote that “racists consider themselves superior beings and are not willing to exchange their superior lives for our inferior ones. They are most vicious and violent when they can practice violence with impunity.” He added: “Moreover, when because of our self-defense there is a danger that the blood of whites may be spilled, the local authorities in the South suddenly enforce law and order when previously they had been complacent toward lawless, racist violence.” Henry Austin would echo those comments: “With Watts exploding a few weeks later, it made a lot of people think, especially at the federal level, that they had to intercede at a great level, or there was going to be hell to pay in this country.”

“The Problem is Civil Obedience” from The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy, updated and expanded 2nd edition by Howard Zinn

Now, I have been studying very closely what happens every day in the courts in Boston, Massachusetts. You would be astounded—maybe you wouldn’t, maybe you have been around, maybe you have lived, maybe you have thought, maybe you have been hit—at how the daily rounds of injustice make their way through this marvelous thing that we call due process. Well, that is my premise. All you have to do is read the Soledad letters of George Jackson, who was sentenced to one year to life, of which he spent ten years, for a seventy-dollar robbery of a filling station. And then there is the U.S. Senator who is alleged to keep 185,000 dollars a year, or something like that, on the oil depletion allowance. One is theft; the other is legislation. Something is wrong, something is terribly wrong when we ship 10,000 bombs full of nerve gas across the country, and drop them in somebody else’s swimming pool so as not to trouble our own. So you lose your perspective after a while. If you don’t think, if you just listen to TV and read scholarly things, you actually begin to think that things are not so bad, or that just little things are wrong. But you have to get a little detached, and then come back and look at the world, and you are horrified. So we have to start from that supposition—that things are really topsy-turvy.

And our topic is topsy-turvy: civil disobedience. As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem . . . Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem. We recognize this for Nazi Germany. We know that the problem there was obedience, that the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed; that was wrong. They should have challenged, and they should have resisted; and if we were only there, we would have showed them. Even in Stalin’s Russia we can understand that; people are obedient, all these herdlike people.

When in all the nations of the world the rule of law is the darling of the leaders and the plague of the people, we ought to begin to recognize this. We have to transcend these national boundaries in our thinking. Nixon and Brezhnev have much more in common with one another than we have with Nixon. J. Edgar Hoover has far more in common with the head of the Soviet secret police than he has with us. It’s the international dedication to law and order that binds the leaders of all countries in a comradely bond. That’s why we are always surprised when they get together—they smile, they shake hands, they smoke cigars, they really like one another no matter what they say. It’s like the Republican and Democratic parties, who claim that it’s going to make a terrible difference if one or the other wins, yet they are all the same. Basically, it is us against them. Yossarian was right, remember, in Catch-22? He had been accused of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, which nobody should ever be accused of, and Yossarian said to his friend Clevinger: “The enemy is whoever is going to get you killed, whichever side they are on.” But that didn’t sink in, so he said to Clevinger: “Now you remember that, or one of these days you’ll be dead.” And remember? Clevinger, after a while, was dead. And we must remember that our enemies are not divided along national lines, that enemies are not just people who speak different languages and occupy different territories. Enemies are people who want to get us killed.

We are asked, “What if everyone disobeyed the law?” But a better question is, “What if everyone obeyed the law?” And the answer to that question is much easier to come by, because we have a lot of empirical evidence about what happens if everyone obeys the law, or if even most people obey the law. What happens is what has happened, what is happening. Why do people revere the law? And we all do; even I have to fight it, for it was put into my bones at an early age when I was a Cub Scout. One reason we revere the law is its ambivalence. In the modern world we deal with phrases and words that have multiple meanings, like “national security.” Oh, yes, we must do this for national security! Well, what does that mean? Whose national security? Where? When? Why? We don’t bother to answer those questions, or even to ask them.

It started way back. When the Bill of Rights was first passed, remember, in the first administration of Washington? Great thing. Bill of Rights passed! Big ballyhoo. At the same time Hamilton’s economic program was passed. Nice, quiet, money to the rich—I’m simplifying it a little, but not too much. Hamilton’s economic program started it off. You can draw a straight line from Hamilton’s economic program to the oil depletion allowance to the tax write-offs for corporations. All the way through—that is the history. The Bill of Rights publicized; economic legislation unpublicized.

We all grow up with the notion that the law is holy. They asked Daniel Berrigan’s mother what she thought of her son’s breaking the law. He burned draft records—one of the most violent acts of this century—to protest the war, for which he was sentenced to prison, as criminals should be. They asked his mother who is in her eighties, what she thought of her son’s breaking the law. And she looked straight into the interviewer’s face, and she said, “It’s not God’s law.” Now we forget that. There is nothing sacred about the law. Think of who makes laws. The law is not made by God, it is made by Strom Thurmond. If you have any notion about the sanctity and loveliness and reverence for the law, look at the legislators around the country who make the laws. Sit in on the sessions of the state legislatures. Sit in on Congress, for these are the people who make the laws which we are then supposed to revere. All of this is done with such propriety as to fool us. This is the problem. In the old days, things were confused; you didn’t know. Now you know. It is all down there in the books. Now we go through due process. Now the same things happen as happened before, except that we’ve gone through the right procedures. In Boston a policeman walked into a hospital ward and fired five times at a black man who had snapped a towel at his arm—and killed him. A hearing was held. The judge decided that the policeman was justified because if he didn’t do it, he would lose the respect of his fellow officers. Well, that is what is known as due process—that is, the guy didn’t get away with it. We went through the proper procedures, and everything was set up. The decorum, the propriety of the law fools us.

What we are trying to do, I assume, is really to get back to the principles and aims and spirit of the Declaration of Independence. This spirit is resistance to illegitimate authority and to forces that deprive people of their life and liberty and right to pursue happiness, and therefore under these conditions, it urges the right to alter or abolish their current form of government—and the stress had been on abolish. But to establish the principles of the Declaration of Independence, we are going to need to go outside the law, to stop obeying the laws that demand killing or that allocate wealth the way it has been done, or that put people in jail for petty technical offenses and keep other people out of jail for enormous crimes. My hope is that this kind of spirit will take place not just in this country but in other countries because they all need it. People in all countries need the spirit of disobedience to the state, which is not a metaphysical thing but a thing of force and wealth. And we need a kind of declaration of interdependence among people in all countries of the world who are striving for the same thing.

“Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison” from Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis

“Advocates of incarceration . . . hoped that the penitentiary would rehabilitate its inmates. Whereas philosophers perceived a ceaseless state of war between chattel slaves and their masters, criminologists hoped to negotiate a peace treaty of sorts within the prison walls. Yet herein lurked a paradox: if the penitentiary’s internal regime resembled that of the plantation so closely that the two were often loosely equated, how could the prison possibly function to rehabilitate criminals?” —Adam Jay Hirsch

The prison is not the only institution that has posed complex challenges to the people who have lived with it and have become so inured to its presence that they could not conceive of society without it. Within the history of the United States the system of slavery immediately comes to mind. Although as early as the American Revolution antislavery advocates promoted the elimination of African bondage, it took almost a century to achieve the abolition of the “peculiar institution.” White antislavery abolitionists such as John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison were represented in the dominant media of the period as extremists and fanatics. When Frederick Douglass embarked on his career as an antislavery orator, white people—even those who were passionate abolitionists—refused to believe that a black slave could display such intelligence. The belief in the permanence of slavery was so widespread that even white abolitionists found it difficult to imagine black people as equals.

It took a long and violent civil war in order to legally disestablish the “peculiar institution.” Even though the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawed involuntary servitude, white supremacy continued to be embraced by vast numbers of people and became deeply inscribed in new institutions. One of these post-slavery institutions was lynching, which was widely accepted for many decades thereafter. Thanks to the work of figures such as Ida B. Wells, an antilynching campaign was gradually legitimized during the first half of the twentieth century. The NAACP, an organization that continues to conduct legal challenges against discrimination, evolved from these efforts to abolish lynching.

In 1883, Frederick Douglass had already written about the South’s tendency to “impute crime to color.” When a particularly egregious crime was committed, he noted, not only was guilt frequently assigned to a black person regardless of the perpetrator’s race, but white men sometimes sought to escape punishment by disguising themselves as black. Douglass would later recount one such incident that took place in Granger County, Tennessee, in which a man who appeared to be black was shot while committing a robbery. The wounded man, however, was discovered to be a respectable white citizen who had colored his face black.

The above example from Douglass demonstrates how whiteness, in the words of legal scholar Cheryl Harris, operates as property.58 According to Harris, the fact that white identity was possessed as property meant that rights, liberties, and self-identity were affirmed for white people, while being denied to black people. The latter’s only access to whiteness was through “passing.” Douglass’s comments indicate how this property interest in whiteness was easily reversed in schemes to deny black people their rights to due process. Interestingly, cases similar to the one Douglass discusses above emerged in the United States during the 1990s: in Boston, Charles Stuart murdered his pregnant wife and attempted to blame an anonymous black man, and in Union, South Carolina, Susan Smith killed her children and claimed they had been abducted by a black carjacker. The racialization of crime—the tendency to “impute crime to color,” to use Frederick Douglass’s words—did not wither away as the country became increasingly removed from slavery. Proof that crime continues to be imputed to color resides in the many evocations of “racial profiling” in our time. That it is possible to be targeted by the police for no other reason than the color of one’s skin is not mere speculation. Police departments in major urban areas have admitted the existence of formal procedures designed to maximize the numbers of African-Americans and Latinos arrested—even in the absence of probable cause. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, vast numbers of people of Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage were arrested and detained by the police agency known as Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). The INS is the federal agency that claims the largest number of armed agents, even more than the FBI.

I grew up in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. Because of its mines—coal and iron ore—and its steel mills that remained active until the deindustrialization process of the 1980s, it was widely known as “the Pittsburgh of the South.” The fathers of many of my friends worked in these mines and mills. It is only recently that I have learned that the black miners and steelworkers I knew during my childhood inherited their place in Birmingham’s industrial development from black convicts forced to do this work under the lease system. As Curtin observes, Many ex-prisoners became miners because Alabama used prison labor extensively in its coalmines. By 1888 all of Alabama’s able male prisoners were leased to two major mining companies: the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TCI) and Sloss Iron and Steel Company. For a charge of up to $18.50 per month per man, these corporations “leased,” or rented prison laborers and worked them in coalmines.69 Learning about this little-acknowledged dimension of black and labor history has caused me to reevaluate my own childhood experiences.

To be sure, I am not suggesting that the abolition of slavery and the lease system has produced an era of equality and justice. On the contrary, racism surreptitiously defines social and economic structures in ways that are difficult to identify and thus are much more damaging. In some states, for example, more than one-third of black men have been labeled felons. In Alabama and Florida, once a felon, always a felon, which entails the loss of status as a rights-bearing citizen. One of the grave consequences of the powerful reach of the prison was the 2000 (s)election of George W. Bush as president. If only the black men and women denied the right to vote because of an actual or presumed felony record had been allowed to cast their ballots, Bush would not be in the White House today. And perhaps we would not be dealing with the awful costs of the War on Terrorism declared during the first year of his administration. If not for his election, the people of Iraq might not have suffered death, destruction, and environmental poisoning by U.S. military forces.

As appalling as the current political situation may be, imagine what our lives might have become if we were still grappling with the institution of slavery—or the convict lease system or racial segregation. But we do not have to speculate about living with the consequences of the prison. There is more than enough evidence in the lives of men and women who have been claimed by ever more repressive institutions and who are denied access to their families, their communities, to educational opportunities, to productive and creative work, to physical and mental recreation. And there is even more compelling evidence about the damage wrought by the expansion of the prison system in the schools located in poor communities of color that replicate the structures and regimes of the prison. When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison. If this is the predicament we face today, what might the future hold if the prison system acquires an even greater presence in our society? In the nineteenth century, antislavery activists insisted that as long as slavery continued, the future of democracy was bleak indeed. In the twenty-first century, antiprison activists insist that a fundamental requirement for the revitalization of democracy is the long-overdue abolition of the prison system.

“Women in Prison: How We Are” by Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard), April 197871 from Voices of a People’s History of the United States, 10th Anniversary Edition, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove

We sit in the bull pen. We are all black. All restless. And we are all freezing. When we ask, the matron tells us that the heating system cannot be adjusted. All of us, with the exception of a woman, tall and gaunt, who looks naked and ravished, have refused the bologna sandwiches. The rest of us sit drinking bitter, syrupy tea. The tall, fortyish woman, with sloping shoulders, moves her head back and forth to the beat of a private tune while she takes small, tentative bites out of a bologna sandwich. Someone asks her what she’s in for. Matter of factly, she says, “They say I killed some nigga. But how could I have when I’m buried down in South Carolina?” Everybody’s face gets busy exchanging looks. A short, stout young woman wearing men’s pants and men’s shoes says, “Buried in South Carolina?” “Yeah,” says the tall woman. “South Carolina, that’s where I’m buried. You don’t know that? You don’t know shit do you? This ain’t me. This ain’t me.” She kept repeating, “This ain’t me” until she had eaten all the bologna sandwiches. Then she brushed off the crumbs and withdrew, head moving again, back into that private world where only she could hear her private tune. Lucille comes to my tier to ask me how much time a “C” felony conviction carries. I know, but i cannot say the words. I tell her i will look it up and bring the sentence charts for her to see. I know that she has just been convicted of manslaughter in the second degree. I also know that she can be sentenced up to fifteen years. I knew from what she had told me before that the District Attorney was willing to plea bargain: Five years probation in exchange for a guilty plea to a lesser charge.

There are no criminals here at Riker’s Island Correctional Institution for Women, (New York), only victims. Most of the women (95 percent) are black and Puerto Rican. Many were abused children. Most have been abused by men and all have been abused by “the system.”

There are no big time gangsters here, no premeditated mass murderers, no godmothers. There are no big time dope dealers, no kidnappers, no Watergate women. There are virtually no women here charged with white collar crimes like embezzling or fraud. Most of the women have drug related cases. Many are charged as accessories to crimes committed by men. The major crimes that women here are charged with are prostitution, pick-pocketing, shop lifting, robbery, and drugs. Women who have prostitution cases, or who are doing “fine” time make up a substantial part of the short term population. The women see stealing or hustling as necessary for the survival of themselves or their children because jobs are scarce and welfare is impossible to live on. One thing is clear: amerikan capitalism is in no way threatened by the women in prison on Riker’s Island.

But beneath the motherly veneer, the reality of guard life is ever present. Most of the guards are black, usually from working class, upward bound, civil service oriented backgrounds. They identify with the middle class, have middle class values and are extremely materialistic. They are not the most intelligent women in the world and many are extremely limited. Most are aware that there is no justice in the amerikan judicial system and that blacks and Puerto Ricans are discriminated against in every facet of amerikan life. But, at the same time, they are convinced that the system is somehow “lenient.” To them, the women in prison are “losers” who don’t have enough sense to stay out of jail. Most believe in the boot strap theory—anybody can “make it” if they try hard enough. They congratulate themselves on their great accomplishments. In contrast to themselves they see the inmate as ignorant, uncultured, self-destructive, weak-minded and stupid. They ignore the fact that their dubious accomplishments are not based on superior intelligence or effort, but only on chance and a civil service list.

“We Remember the Days of Glory but Tend to Forget They Were Fourteen-Hour Days” and “Even Liars Know the Truth” from ’68 by Paco Ignacio Taibo, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith

During the mobilization of August 1968 the brigades occupied the streets without exposing a flank to the repressive forces. Those forces perceived the Movement as an unmanageable mass. With whom could you negotiate when the leadership consisted of three hundred people? Who was an interlocutor, especially an interlocutor you could frighten and corner? Who could you buy off? The Movement failed to fit any of the State’s usual ways of dealing with an adversary. The mobilization had two faces: the slippery brigades on the one hand and imposing demonstrations with half a million or more participants on the other.

The leadership, calling itself the National Strike Council (CNH) consisted of three representatives from each school on strike; these were often rotating delegates, which made the Council easy to infiltrate but impossible to split, scare, corrupt, or detach from its base through negotiation. Since control was denied by these means, the only options left were isolation and repression. In any event negotiation had no place in the operating procedures of an authoritarian system whose reference points were the Aztecs, Cortés, and the PRI. According to our national tradition, an authority that negotiates surrenders its power. On the propaganda front, the government had already lost the capital and several provincial cities to which the strike had spread. Television and the printed press were almost worthless against the half-million voices that rebutted their lies day in and day out.

[…] Hours later that night the government counterattacked. Armored vehicles emerged from the gates of the National Palace, and soldiers with bayonets fixed advanced upon the three thousand students who had stayed to guard the Zócalo. Heroism at that time was closely akin to madness, as witness David Cortés, “El Ruso,” who picked up a piece of metal pipe from the ground and went to meet one of the approaching light tanks. He was soon face to face with the fucking thing, which kept on roaring toward him. The soldier on top, manning a machine gun, and David locked eyes in a staring match. Suddenly, David leaped forward and began raining blows with his pipe on the tank’s carapace, as though he really thought he could dent it. The tank came to a halt. We got our guy out of there, we had to drag him away, and the soldier never took his eyes off him for a second. Naturally, David lost all memory of this crazy moment. He asked us to tell him what happened, laughing sardonically. “Do I look like an idiot to you?” he wanted to know. “The kind of guy that would do shit like that?” The clearing of the protesters from the Zócalo was not a rout, but a glorious withdrawal in which the armored vehicles pressed forward and the students fell back little by little, conceding ten or fifteen meters, slowing down, waiting until they almost touched the bayonets of the front rank of infantrymen. Things went on like this, block by block, as far as the Paseo de la Reforma, with car horns sounding in the night. And thousands of faces of residents in pajamas and nightdresses disappeared at their windows: witnesses to national history in the making. As the retreat proceeded, the protesters would stop from time to time to hold meetings for the sole benefit of the occasional night stroller. And so we went, street by street, each of us resisting the temptation to turn and run, backing up but never turning our backs on the soldiers, and singing. If heroism was defined by the capacity to stand firm in face of one’s own fear, then . . .

On 30 September the army relinquished the University buildings it had taken over. The government was hoping that the Movement had learned its lesson and would call off the strike. But on the first day of October the assemblies voted to hold out and demanded that the IPN schools be handed back. The Movement had tremendous resilience. In two months it had created thousands of cadres, thousands of speakers. No sooner did it find a space where it could act than it expanded into it, built up its strength, reorganized itself, and once more set about the tasks of deployment and propaganda. On 2 October the army attacked the rally in Tlatelolco. What happened is well known. The story of the massacre has been told and retold. The attempt to falsify history—which the machinery of the government launched moments after the first students fell, hit by gunfire a response. The response is in the second part of Elena Poniatowska’s book La Noche de Tlatelolco (published in English as Massacre in Mexico) and in the thousands of Tlatelolco poems. Preserved there forever is the rebuttal to the false version of the facts offered by General Crisóforo Monzón, who said in an official statement that the army had intervened to restore order in the midst of an exchange of fire among students. The truth is there, as compared with the official version propagated by the Senate commission, in which the students are said to have fired first. Today everybody knows that the provocateurs were soldiers disguised as civilians, each wearing a single identifying white glove, soldiers from the Olimpia Battalion. Today everybody knows that flares thrown from a military helicopter were the signal to open fire, the signal for the army to begin to shoot into the unarmed crowd. Today even the liars know the truth. But there is little consolation in the fact that the version of the survivors has finally triumphed over the official story.

“Prison, Where Is Thy Victory?: January 3, 1970” by Huey P. Newton, from The New Huey P. Newton Reader, edited by David Hilliard and Donald Weise,

When a person studies mathematics he learns that there are many mathematical laws that determine the approach he must take to solving the problems presented to him. In the study of geometry one of the first laws a person learns is that “the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts.” This means simply that one cannot have a geometrical figure such as a circle or a square that contains more than it does when broken down into smaller parts. Therefore, if all the smaller parts add up to a certain amount, the entire figure cannot add up to a larger amount. The prison cannot have a victory over the prisoner because those in charge take the same kind of approach and assume if they have the whole body in a cell that they have contained all that makes up the person. But a prisoner is not a geometrical figure, and an approach that is successful in mathematics is wholly unsuccessful when dealing with human beings. In the case of the human we are not dealing only with the single individual, we are also dealing with the ideas and beliefs that have motivated him and that sustain him, even when his body is confined. In the case of humanity the whole is much greater than its parts because the whole includes the body, which is measurable and confineable and also the ideas, which cannot be measured and cannot be confined.

The ideas that can and will sustain our movement for total freedom and dignity of the people cannot be imprisoned, for they are to be found in the people, all the people, wherever they are. As long as the people live by the ideas of freedom and dignity, there will be no prison that can hold our movement down. Ideas move from one person to another by the association of brothers and sisters who recognize that a most evil system of capitalism has set us against each other, although our real enemy is the exploiter who profits from our poverty. When we realize such an idea, then we come to love and appreciate our brothers and sisters who we may have seen as enemies, and those exploiters who we may have seen as friends are revealed for what they truly are to all oppressed people. The people are the idea. The respect and dignity of the people as they move toward their freedom are the sustaining forces that reach into and out of the prison. The walls, the bars, the guns, and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people. And the people must always carry forward the idea, which is their dignity and their beauty.

The prison operates with the concept that since it has a person’s body it has his entire being, because the whole cannot be greater than the sum of its parts. They put the body in a cell and seem to get some sense of relief and security from that fact. The idea of prison victory, then, is that when the person in jail begins to act, think, and believe the way they want him to, they have won the battle and the person is then “rehabilitated.” But this cannot be the case because those who operate the prisons have failed to examine their own beliefs thoroughly, and they fail to understand the types of people they attempt to control. Therefore, even when the prison thinks it has won the victory, there is no victory.

There are two types of prisoners. The largest number are those who accept the legitimacy of the assumptions upon which the society is based. They wish to acquire the same goals as everybody else: money, power, and conspicuous consumption. In order to do so, however, they adopt techniques and methods that the society has defined as illegitimate. When this is discovered such people are put in jail. They may be called “illegitimate capitalists” since their aim is to acquire everything this capitalistic society defines as legitimate. The second type of prisoner is the one who rejects the legitimacy of the assumptions upon which the society is based. He argues that the people at the bottom of the society are exploited for the profit and advantage of those at the top. Thus, the oppressed exist and will always be used to maintain the privileged status of the exploiters. There is no sacredness, there is no dignity, in either exploiting or being exploited. Although this system may make the society function at a high level of technological efficiency, it is an illegitimate system, since it rests upon the suffering of humans who are as worthy and as dignified as those who do not suffer. Thus, the second type of prisoner says that the society is corrupt and illegitimate and must be overthrown. This second type of prisoner is the “political prisoner.” They do not accept the legitimacy of the society and cannot participate in its corrupting exploitation, whether they are in the prison or on the block.

The prison cannot gain a victory over either type of prisoner no matter how hard it tries. The “illegitimate capitalist” recognizes that if he plays the game the prison wants him to play, he will have his time reduced and be released to continue his activities. Therefore, he is willing to go through the prison programs and say the things the prison authorities want to hear. The prison assumes he is “rehabilitated” and ready for the society. The prisoner has really played the prison’s game so that he can be released to resume pursuit of his capitalistic goals. There is no victory, for the prisoner from the “git-go” accepted the idea of the society. He pretends to accept the idea of the prison as a part of the game he has always played.

The prison cannot gain a victory over the political prisoner because he has nothing to be rehabilitated from or to. He refuses to accept the legitimacy of the system and refuses to participate. To participate is to admit that the society is legitimate because of its exploitation of the oppressed. This is the idea that the political prisoner does not accept, this is the idea for which he has been imprisoned, and this is the reason why he cannot cooperate with the system. The political prisoner will, in fact, serve his time just as will the “illegitimate capitalist.” Yet the idea that motivated and sustained the political prisoner rests in the people. All the prison has is a body.

The dignity and beauty of man rests in the human spirit, which makes him more than simply a physical being. This spirit must never be suppressed for exploitation by others. As long as the people recognize the beauty of their human spirits and move against suppression and exploitation, they will be carrying out one of the most beautiful ideas of all time. Because the human whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. The ideas will always be among the people. The prison cannot be victorious because walls, bars, and guards cannot conquer or hold down an idea.

Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://niklasblog.com/?p=24943

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