George Jackson Letter

GEORGE JACKSON LETTER

April 17, 1970

Dear Fay:

Slavery is an economic condition. The classical chattel and today's neo-slavery must be defined first in terms of economics. The chattel is a property, one man exercising the property rights of his established economic order, the other man as that property. He can move that property or hold it in one square yard of the earth's surface; he can let it breed other slaves, or make it breed other slaves; he can sell it, beat it, work it, maim it, fuck it, kill it. But if he wants to keep it and enjoy all of the benefits that property of this kind can render, he must feed it sometimes, he must clothe it against the elements, he must provide a modicum of shelter. Slavery then, the chattel type just mentioned, is succinctly, an economic condition which manifests itself in the total loss or absence of self-determination.

The new slavery, the modern variety of chattel slavery, updated to disguise itself, places the victim in a factory or in the case of most Blacks in support roles inside and around the factory system (service trades) working for a wage. However if work cannot he found in or around the factory complex, today's neo-slavery does not allow for that modicum of food and shelter I mentioned in connection with chattel slavery; no one owns your body in that sense, you are free--to starve. The sense and meaning of slavery comes through as a result of our ties to the wage. You must have it, without it you would starve or expose yourself to the elements; taken a few hours at a time, analyzed part by part, we find that one's entire day centers around the acquisition of the wage. It is for sure that one has no control over the eight or ten hours on the job, all of that is determined by others; that leaves 14 to 16 hours, but since you don't live at the factory you'll have to subtract at least another hour for transportation, leaving you with 13 to 15 hours to yourself. It is necessary also for you to feed yourself, strength must be maintained since on the job the efficiency expert will be watching; this leaves 10 to 12 hours, if you can afford three meals. Rest is also a factor in efficiency, and since men associate rest with long periods of unconscious repose, we'll take 8 hours away for sleeping, leaving 2 to 4 hours, but--one must bathe, comb, clean teeth, shave, dress--there's no point in protracting this. I think it should be generally accepted that if a man (or woman) works for a wage at a job that they don't enjoy, and I am convinced that no one could enjoy any type of assembly line work, or plumbing or hod carrying, or any job in the service trades, then they qualify for this definition of neo-slave. The man who owns the factory or shop or business runs your life; you are dependent on this "owner". He organizes your work, the work upon which your whole life source and style depends. He indirectly determines your whole day, in "organizing you for work." You qualify, if you don't make any more in wages then you need to live; the chattel slave worked for subsistence, recall, and if you are working for subsistence wage (nothing left over after bills) you qualify for my definition! You qualify if you cannot afford to leave California for New York, if you cannot visit Zanzibar, Havana, Peking, or even Paris when you get the urge, because there are people who can, and if you're held in one spot on this earth because of your economic status, your wage, it is in effect the same as being held in one spot because you are the property of...but you can travel a few states over to your father's funeral--if you don't mind sacrificing some small thing for awhile after. Here in the Black colony the pigs beat and maim us still, murder us still: justified homicide and reinstatement; they murder us and call it justified homicide. A brother who had a "smoking pipe" in his belt, shot in the back of the head, and a 14 year old girl!!!! And in threes now, they once were satisfied for "examples", but that was when an "owner" had to accept a cash loss with each fatality. How many tricks has Black mama turned to keep things together. Neo-slavery is an economic condition, a small number of men exercising the property rights of their established economic order, organizing and controlling the life style of the slave--as if he were in fact, property. Succinctly: an economic condition which manifests itself in the total loss or absence of self-determination. Only after this is understood and accepted can we go on to the dialectic that will help us in a remedy.

A diagnosis of our discomfort is necessary before the surgery; it's always necessary to justify the letting of blood. And we don't want the knife to damage any related parts that could be spared for later use.

The pig is an instrument of neo-slavery, to be hated and avoided; he is pushed to the front by the men who exercise unnatural right over property. You've heard the patronizing shit about the "thin blue line"; this blue line protects property, the owners of property, and the order or system that allows men to accumulate and hold property. If it were merely a case of them protecting the house you're paying for or wish and hope to be paying on next year this "blue line" would not be needed, we can dismiss that right out front, they are not protecting you, your home, and its contents. Recall they never found the TV set you lost in that burglary. They're protecting the unnatural right of a few men to own the means of all of our subsistence; the pig is protecting the right of a few private individuals to own public property!! The pig, a disgusting animal is to be hated, hell is surely his just reward; however, his immolation isn't enough--each being an expendable instrument, they are easily replaced. The pig is merely the gun, the tool, a mentally inanimate utensil; it is necessary to destroy the gun, but destroying the gun and sparing the hands that hold it will forever relegate us to a defensive action, hold our revolution in the doldrums, ultimately defeat us. The animal that holds the gun, that has loosed the pig of war on us is a bitter-ender, an intractable, gluttonous vulture who "must" eat at our hearts to live. Midas-motivated, never satisfied, everything he touches will turn into shit! Slaying the shitty pig will have absolutely no healing effect at all if we leave this vulture to touch someone else. Spare the hand that holds the gun and it will simply fashion another. The Viet Cong-National Liberation Front of Viet Nam do a wonderful job of slaughtering pigs; the U.S. expeditionary forces after nearly 18 yrs., and a hundred thousand fatalities (or more) are no nearer to containing the Vietnamese thrust for freedom than were the French whom they replaced. The Viet soldier has viciously attacked and destroyed the pigs and guns (sometimes right in the harbor) but this alone has not completely solved his problems. If the Cong could get to those factories and the people who own and organize them the war would end in a few months. All wars would end. The pigs who have descended upon the Vietnamese colony are the same who have come down on us; they come in all colors though they are mainly white, they have the same background, culturally, (or anticulturally), the same mentality and they have the same intent: to preserve the economically depressed areas of the world as secondary markets and sources of cheap raw materials for the Amerikan Fascist. The Black Colonies inside the Amerikan Fascist State are first, secondary markets, and second, a source of cheap raw materials; in our case this "cheap raw material" is our bodies "giving all of the benefits that property of this kind can render." How much more in wages would they have to pay a White unionized, garbage collector? And Black mama tricks for ten-and-two?

The colonial effect is complete with the introduction of the missionaries.

Right behind the expeditionary forces, (the pigs) comes the missionary, the pacification teams, to civilize us, to bless us with the benefits of christendom, to school us on the value of symbolism, dead presidents, and the rediscount rate. It was to these missionaries that the Black colony lost its conscience. To the schools, the churches, the newspapers and other periodicals that are operated by the fascist fourth estate.

The cultural links to the established capitalist society set around and over the colony has been a lot closer than we like to admit. Economic and political links, except in the sense of parasite-host, are non-existent, (since there is a definite ceiling on the number of clowns and jugglers that the kingdom can maintain). But in the area of culture, and I am using this word in the narrow sense out of necessity, we are bonded to the Fascist society by chains that have in every respect strangled our intellect, scrambled our wits, and sent us stumbling backward in a wild, disorganized retreat from reality. We don't want a piece of the pie; it's rotten, putrid, repulsive to all the senses. Why are we rushing to board a sinking ship? When we join hands with the established fascist scum in any way, it gives the people of the world, the Righteous People, of the Congo, Tanzania, Sudan, of Cuba, China, Viet Nam, etc., the legitimate right to hate us too.

The Swedish people and their government hate the American Fascist, (and almost every civilized state must). They show this disregard every chance they get, at small jobs at the capitalist's fat backs; as punishment the American government dresses some Black clown in a stove-pipe hat and sends him to them as ambassador. This Black cat isn't really representing the U.S.A., he's representing us as fools. The Swede's throw bricks at him and call for the "Nigger" to go home. Of all the peoples of Europe (Western) the French and the Swedish are reputed to be the least racist. There is no such thing as a Black Swede, consequently the ruling classes have never found it expedient to scandalize our name. There has never been much contact and no competition between the Swedish nation and any Black nation within the last millennium, and since I don't think anyone is born a racist, there is no racist aura. About 99 per cent of our Black population lives in, is a part of, or came from one of the depressed colonial enclaves; Blacks in Amerika are everywhere considered a distinct caste resting at the bottom of the social spectrum. Chances are that the old Slave they sent to Sweden has never spent a night in the colonies but still he represents the Black oppressed. In that we are almost all lumped together here at the bottom and other people know that we have no real stake in the Capitalist economy or in the mainstream of its day to day life. So when the Slave turns up in his tails and stove-pipe hat, a distorted imitation of the genuine fool, (tomfool?), the hatred felt so deeply for the Amerikan Fascist State is transferred onto us!

A weapon of incalculable value in its war on the people, the government selects and trains these running dogs very carefully, provides the proper incentive and sends them scrambling, tails and all, outward, "to represent the establishment." Any stratagem that follows is necessarily anti-climactic. Whole kennels are sent to the African Nations on the Ambassadorial level (and lower of course) on the supposition that the people of these nations will be able to relate better to a Black face; the leaders of these nations if they can be counted among the righteous are never impressed, but this sort of thing affects the African masses deeply. Several years ago in one of the Central African states a gathering of the people marched against the local representatives of the Amerikan government, the U.S.A.I.S., over an issue that won't come to mind now, (there have been so many) but they were resentful enough to carry their protest demonstration to violent extremes. They threw bricks and fire and called for the slaves blood, they tore down the Yankee rag and danced on it, spit on it, and were about to burn it, they would have burned it and gone on to sack and burn the Fascist propaganda center, but for the running dog, tomfool, stopped them, harangued them in the voice of the ventriloquist, and ran old glory back to its familiar station -- obstructing the Sun. They should have hung that nigger from the flag-pole, by the fat part of his neck, but they were too shocked, the situation too confusing, the running dogs presence and in the capacity that he served had just the desired effect; the ventriloquist in speaking and acting through tomfool first, representing his own interests to an extent that he never could have hoped for otherwise, second, he misrepresented the Black Ameriken colony, throwing up one more barrier to the communion that we must establish with the other oppressed peoples of the world if we are to be successful in the armed struggle that looms ahead.

Viet Nam -- I can never think of that affair without subjecting myself to a case of acute heartburn.

They send us to school to learn how to be so disgusting; we send our children to "places of learning" operated by men who hate us, hate truth, and who stand to lose a great deal if we regain our senses. It is clear that no school would be better. Burn it: all the Fascist literature, burn that too. Then equip yourself with the "Little Red Book". We can regain our senses no other way; of course the fascists are going to teach that Black is White, there's money involved. Burn it; without the mission, and missionaries there would be no more running dogs. We break the cultural lack when we destroy "Johnson Publications", and the little Black tabloids that mimic the Fascist press over to denunciations of "Black Extremist". Burn them, or take them over as people's collectives, and give the colonies a dynamite case of self-determination, anti-colonialism, Mao think!!!!!!

I attended my last year of high school at Bayview High -- that's in San Q. -- where I did seven years of the ten that I have in now. The schools in the joint are no different than those out there in the colony at large, with the exception that we are not coeducational. We use the same fascist textbooks that contain the same undercurrent of racism and overtones of nationalism; the missionaries themselves are the same stereotypes with the same dry dictum.

At the time my eventual release on parole was conditional to my finishing high-school, and of course being a good boy, never showing any anger, or displeasure, or individuality. I was trying to fake it. I would never have been in the mission school otherwise. I was working in the daytime and attended school evenings.

The biology wasn't too bad. The instructor seldom ventured an opinion outside the subjects related to science, but he was exceptional; I attribute this to the fact that he was somewhat younger than the other pundits. Each of them had a fixed opinion on every material and metaphysical feature of the universe. Colonel Davis in history was outstanding for two very typical characteristics of his profession, temperament and foolishness. True to fascist persuasion, this jackass was so patriotic and Republican that he actually proposed we begin and end each class with a pledge of allegiance to the flag from a kneeling position. He was tall and square and grey-blond, a veteran of several declared and undeclared Yankee wars. If you passed the flag without genuflection you had this fool to fight. I sat through his shit for a month; Amerika the beautiful, the righteous, the only nation on earth where everyone can afford a flush toilet and a traffic ticket. All Russians were fat Tartars, the Japanese were copyists, Arabs couldn't fight, neither could the French, all Africans were primitives who didn't know when they were well off, Vietnamese were just niggers with slant eyes, (there were four Blacks in the class), the Chinese were so stupid

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that they couldn't feed themselves, that they must inevitably return to the good old days and ways of the rick-shaw, pig-tail, the cooly, of opium dens and cat-houses. I took this shit with a stony calm for one month; I tried to get out of the class five or six times but you have to have a clear life and death situation to get out of any thing once you get in. This is in keeping with the overall prison conspiracy, I.E. you have no will, you have no choice or control, so be wise -- surrender. There's this sign hanging everywhere your eyes may happen to rest, begging: "Oh lord, help me to accept those things I cannot change." A life-death situation is necessary to get out; that's just what I had but I couldn't admit to it -- looks bad on the Parole Board report. I tried to keep ahead between myself and this representative of the great silent majority, failing this I would fix my eyes on one of the six flags in the room (one in each corner, two on the desk) and try to endure. We and this cat fell all the way out in the end. I never planned it that way, in fact my plan was to hide my face and hang on. The session we had was completely spontaneous, it started in the opening minutes of our two hour class. This silent majority had just completed a hymn to the great Amerikan corporate monster with the line "now haven't we all the right to be proud." I said "No". The guy glanced at me, blinked, looked away and kept right on with his eulogy. My answer didn't register with him; he heard me but he was positive that he heard me wrong. In the cloister of this man's mind my displeasure, any dissatisfaction is just too impossible to be true. It is best that this silent majority remain silent, every time one opens his month a pack of lies fall out. The good colonel was explaining that corporate capitalism, the end result of a long evolutionary chain of other economic arrangements, is as perfect and flawless as men can ever hope to accomplish, it is the only economic order that allows for man's natural inclinations, and that the other barbarous nations of Asia and Africa who have abandoned capitalism for planned economics must ultimately fail since the incentive motive inherent within the capitalist ideal is missing; without the profit and loss incentive, production will remain low and eventually fail, I stood up, sat on the back of my desk, put one foot on the seat and told this cat that he had just told "another" lie; I don't know why l was doing this, I even felt a thrill of sympathy for the fool at first, his mouth dropped open like a shark's, his ears and forehead and nose showed that he was as red-blooded an Ameriken as anyone could ever become, and his hands in an unconscious impulse of their own locked themselves around the base of the two flag-poles on his desk, like he would protect the little pieces of colored rag from the impudent and unpatriotic nigger who did-just-blaspheme!

"What'd you say boy?" I said "you've been lying for a month now about 'work ethics' and 'voting processes' and 'economic incentives', you've been lying all your life really, and now I want to question some of this stuff. Can you stand it?"

I didn't wait for an answer. but continued, "I've worked in factories here in this country, on assembly lines, doing production work. I've made some study of mass production procedures in heavy and light industry, and I've looked into political economy in general, and I'm certain that in everything you've said in here for the last month, there was a conscious intent to misrepresent the truth, present only those parts of the truth that supported your contentions or to omit the truth altogether. This thing about incentive, if it's a factor, in production, and I concede that much, it is, for it to have any relevance at all, in order for it to influence the volume of production, or the quality, it's pretty clear that this incentive must find some way of communicating itself down to the worker. I can understand an owner or executive having the desire to make money-profit -- but since this ambition is a very personal thing, how does it affect the attitude and productivity of the worker? His wage will be the same if he works hard, not so hard, or not hard at all, and it is ultimately on how hard the worker works that volume and quality depends."

He leaned back in his chair, ran his hands through his hair, palpitated about the nose and upper lip, looked at his flag and then at me and answered "Yes, well in our factory setups we have quotas to meet and foremen and efficiency experts to see that they are met."

"You did say quotas? That sounds like something from one of Fidel's public addresses, you know, sugar quotas -- the difference of course being that Fidel is depending on a cooperation that springs from a sense of participation, and perhaps the knowledge that the volume and quality of production determines their general well being, rather than the personal fortunes of an "owner" or small group of "owners". In the factories that I worked in and have observed the principle interests of most of the workers was coffee and lunch breaks or quitting time; we watched the clock, watched out for the foreman and other spies and made as many trips to the toilet as we could possibly expect to get away with. Although the profit motive may excite owner and supervisor to invest and organize for production, the index of productivity is determined by the attitudes of the worker in a plant that is not totally automated and even then it would depend on the workers in the machine, tool and maintenance sectors to a great extent. This being the case it is the diametrical opposite of your contention that is true; there is less real incentive. Based on the impulse to gain benefits, inherent within the modern form of Capitalism. It's clear to me that the worker, who felt that the machine, the factory, all factories were in part his own would be very much concerned about productivity and quality of product, much more concerned than one who has no more at stake than an inadequate wage.

"But you missed the meaning of my statement," this is him talking now, "the spur of profit and the fear of loss are the motivation that have made the capitalist system of production efficient; it automatically checks the marginal facilities and factors of production, it is responsive to demand and supply, i.e. the demands of the consumers and the availability of materials, and this responsiveness is automatic, built in, an inherent part of the system."

The same can be said for any systems of political economy; with planned, people's economics however the automatic feature is dropped and demand is not stimulated artificially in the Madison Ave. sense. It's fabulous and misleading to claim profit and loss motivation a feature of capitalism only; it is a feature of all economics in all time past and present. The only difference is that with capitalism the spur is driven into the flanks of the people by a relative few individuals who by chance or bent of ferocity have been able to make fraudulent claims on the rights to profit, the rights to benefit from wealth created by labor first, applied to materials from man's (plural possessive) source of life support -- nature. In the People's Republics of Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe this right to profit -- benefits from their labor and the land -- is being returned to the people, the people are spurred by the profit motive collectively; a situation far more conducive to productivity since ultimately productivity depends on the attitude of the individual worker. Proportionally China has achieved more economically in twenty years than the U.S. has in two hundred, of course they had the advantage of being able to avoid the terrible mistakes made by the U.S. and Western Europe in those two-hundred years, but a comparison between today's China and let's say today's India and Indonesia, where they have developed nothing economically, will point up clearly which system is best oriented to meet the needs of the people. The leadership in India stayed with capitalism, (private-enterprise) when China turned to revolutionary People's socialism with communism projected for the future -- I am certain that everyone in this room has the intelligence to understand that India's "race riots" and "street sleepers" are not indications that China has taken the wrong road."

"But they're starving in China," this from him with great vehemence, he's on his feet now hair streaming over his forehead, fists balled, chest out, shoulders thrown back.

"No one starves in China, that's your ignorance speaking now. You were probably just lying before, but it is possible that you are ignorant enough to think that people starve in China still, because they were starving in such great number when you were there in the 40's serving the Fascist military-industrial Establishment. You peoples' ignorance on these matters have prompted the Chinese and other Third World nations to the observation that you all live behind a veritable Curtain of Ignorance. There are more people starving in the U.S., the Black Belt of southeastern U.S. and in all the large cities, in the Appalachian Mts. and grape fields of California than in any other country on earth with the possible exception of India. China sends grain to other countries on long term, interest-free loan basis. Vietnam, Egypt, Pakistan and some others are eating Chinese grains.

"Nigger they just bought 100,000 tons of wheat from Canada last month."

"You did say they "bought" it, it means that they must be doing pretty well; the principle of economic advantage means that the people in their respective areas, nations if you prefer, with their respective differences in climate and topography should produce that thing which is easy and natural for them to produce. They will with proper organization be able to produce a surplus of this thing that they produce well, and it is this surplus that the well ordered society (of today at least) uses to exchange for the things that they cannot produce economically. China bought that wheat from Canada with other food products, some of it finished produce, and with other raw materials that Canada needed; that deal last month was simply good economics on China's part. Canada buys beef from Argentina; does that mean that Canada is about to collapse economically'? Nothing stays the same. Davis, not even for an instant, that means that if a thing isn't growing, it's decaying, People's eco-government has been on the march since the close of W. W. II everywhere building, developing, challenging the existence of and defeating capitalist based systems that function on servitude of the people. The inevitable failure will be with capitalism, the guns of Viet Nam have sounded its death knell. We know how to fight you now; capitalism is dying right here tonight, look at yourself, you're defeated." He was advancing on me in his Marquis of Queensburg boxing stance. I got out of the class that night. I haven't been able to get out of the joint however.

We don't want people like Davis teaching the children, he has himself been educated into idiocy. His favorite platitude was that "Amerikans enjoyed hard work, desire gainful employment and have the natural inclination to be thrifty and save." This is a shot against the automated welfare state. In effect he is stating that given the choice Amerikans would rather do the work with their hands and their time that a machine could do better and faster. Sounds pretty silly to me. I certainly don't like to work, and as I've stated before I don't think anyone could honestly enjoy the monotony of an assembly line. And the garbage collecting, the street sweeping, the window washing, who enjoys such things? I'm all for the machines taking over in every sector of the economy that they can be applied to. I wouldn't have the least difficulty in finding something to do with my time. As long as my check comes by mail, as long as I didn't have to stand in some line somewhere to pick it up, I would never have a complaint. To "live by the sweat of thy brow" was intended as a curse. The conservatives (of their privilege) would have us now believe that work is great fun. The capitalist eden fits my description of hell. They're maniacal, the exact opposite of righteous. They've turned the world up-side down, set us back a thousand years; to heil with a silent majority, I am an internationalist. Looking around the world on an international basis I see people like myself in the majority; we'll either bend these to righteousness or band them to our will.

To do so however does call for cooperation, communion between our related parts, communion between colony and colony, nation and nation, the common bond being the desire to humble the oppressor, the need to destroy capitalist man and his terrible, ugly machine. If there were any differences or grievances between us in the Black colonies and the peoples of other colonies across the country, around the world, we should be willing to forget them in the desperate need for coordination against Amerikan Fascism.

International coordination is the key to defeating this thing that must expand to live. Our inability to work with other peoples, other slaves who have the same master, is a consequence of the inferiority complex we have been conditioned into. We're afraid that in the process the Chinese will trick us, or the White folks who support socialism and liberation of all the Amerikan colonies really just want to use us, trick us, "we can't trust them, they'll trick us." Well, if we're tricks we can expect to get tricked and should rightly be fearful. This paranoia is a carry-over from the days when a white or brown face in a black crowd meant that the white or brown brain was controlling things; the days when some of us even felt that nothing could function properly without the presence of a white brain, when we did allow them to take things over, when we were dealing with and consorting with whites of fascist-bourgeois mentality, who did have or do have smug dictatorial mentalities, and we were lazy enough, and sufficiently convinced of our own inferiority to allow them to take us over. Now as things stand in the new light of "different days", with our revolution in  the doldrums, our struggles counterpoised by vicious political kills and avalanches of propaganda, terror, and tokenism, we must overcome the paranoia; it's based on lack of confidence in our ability to control situations--no one can take us over or betray our interests if we are vigilant and aggressively intelligent--we must accept the spirit of the "true internationalism" called for by comrade Che Guevara. It is not a matter of trusting anyone, though I personally find that I can still trust certain general types of people since first I am people, and second I am assured of my ability to

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detect in advance any atavistic changes that portend betrayal; but it isn't a matter of trusting the good will of other slaves and other colonies and other peoples, it is simply a matter of common need. We need allies, we have a powerful enemy who cannot be defeated without an allied effort! The enemy at present is the capitalist system and its supporters, our prime interest is to destroy them. Anyone else with this same interest must be embraced, we must be a embraced, we must work with, beside, through, over, under, anyone, regardless of their external physical features, whose aim is the same as ours in this. Capitalism must be destroyed, and after it is destroyed if we find that we still have problems, we'll work them out. That the nature of life, struggle, permanent revolution, that is the situation we were born into. There are other peoples on this earth, they simply "are".

In denying this situation that is, and turning inward in our misery and accepting any form of racism, we are taking on the characteristic of our enemy, "and we are resigning ourselves to defeat". For in forming a conspiracy aimed at the destruction of the system that holds us all in the throes of a desperate insecurity we must have coordinating elements connecting us and our moves to the moves of the other colonies, the African colonies, those in Asia and Latin Amerika, in Appalachia, and the South Western bean fields. If it is more expedient for a white revolutionary to "neutralize" a certain area should I deny him the opportunity to contribute by withholding the protective influence of my cooperation?! If I did it makes me a fool and a myopic coward--a trick.

The revolutionary of Viet Nam, this brother is so tried, so tested, so clearly anti-fascist, anti-amerikan, that I must be suspicious of the sincerity of any Black who claims anti-amerikanism and anti-fascism but who cannot embrace the Cong. The Chinese have aided every anti-colonial movement that occurred since they were successful in their own, the ones in Africa especially, and have offered us in the Amerikan colonies any and all support that we require from hand grenades to H-bombs. Some of us would deny these wonderful and righteous people. I accept them; far from me to ever deny their right to existence or their offer. I accept their assist in my struggle with this mutual enemy, I accept and appreciate any love that we can build out of our relation in crisis, and I'll never, never allow my enemy to turn my mind or hand against them. The Yankee dog that proposes to me that I should join him in containing the freedom of a Vietnamese or a Chinese Brother of the revolution, and I don't care how much he has to offer in the way of "short term" material benefits, is going to first get spit on.

We must establish a "true internationalism," with other anti-colonial peoples, we will then be on the road of the true revolutionary, only then can we expect to be able to seize the power that is rightfully ours, the power to control the circumstances surrounding our day to day lives, to make our own mistakes, not have the fascist make them for us.

The Fascist must expand to live, he has pushed his frontiers to the farthest lands and their peoples. This is an aspect of his being, an ungovernable compulsion, this perverted mechanical monster suffers under a disease that hurls him through alternate moods when he is seized by ungovernable impulses to build things that are ugly and when he must destroy that which is beautiful, we are living under the shadow of the sword. I just read in a legal newspaper that 50 percent of all the people ever executed in this country by the State were Black and 100 percent were lower class poor. I'm going to bust my heart trying to stick stop to these smug, degenerate, primitive omnivorous, uncivil...and anyone who would aid me, I embrace you. We of the Black Amerikan Colony must finally take our courage in hand, control our fear, adopt a realistic picture of this world and our place within it. We are not Fascist, or Amerikans, we are an oppressed, economically depressed colonial people, we were brought here, from Africa and other parts of the world of palm and sun, under duress, and have passed all our days here under duress, the people who run this country will never let us succeed to power, everything in history that was of any value, and did change hands, was taken by force. We must organize our thoughts, get behind the revolutionary vanguard, make the correct alliances this time, and fall on our enemies, the enemies of all righteousness, with a ruthless relentless will to win! History sweeps on, we must not let it escape our influence this time!!!!

I am an extremist. I call for extreme measures to solve extreme problems. Where face and freedom are concerned I do not use or prescribe half-measures. To me life without control over the determining factors is not worth the effort of drawing breath, without self-determination I am extremely displeased.

International capitalism cannot be destroyed without the extremes of struggle, the entire colonial world is watching the Blacks inside the U.S., they are waiting and wondering about us, "if we will come to our senses." Their problems and struggle with the Amerikan monster is much more difficult than it would be if we actively aided them; we are on the inside, we are the only ones, (besides the very small white minority left) who can get at the monster's heart without subjecting the world to nuclear fire. We have a momentous historical role to act out if we will, and the whole world for all times in the future will love us and remember us as the righteous people who made it possible for the world to live on. If we fail through fear and lack of aggressive imagination then the slaves of the future will curse us, as we sometimes curse those of yesterday. I don't want to die and leave a few sad songs and a hump in the ground as my only monument. I want to leave a world that is "liberated" from trash, pollution, racist progress with poverty as a by-product, nation-states and consequently nation-state wars and armies, from pomp, bigotry, parochialism, a thousand different brands of truth, licentious usurious economics.

PHOTO: DAN O'NEIL/LNS

(Editor's Note: George Jackson has been in prison in the California penal system since 1960. He was sentenced to 1 - life, for robbery. In fact, he was merely giving a friend a ride home, when the friend asked him to stop at a gas station, robbed it, and without telling Jackson, told him to drive off. The friend was willing, as was the gas station attendant, to testify that George had nothing to do with the robbery. But George is black, and besides, he'd already served time as a juvenile in reform school (for another crime that he absolutely did not commit), and his appointed lawyer advised him to plead guilty. So justice was served. The friend who committed the actual robbery was released from prison after three years.

As each year passed and it became increasingly obvious to George that "being a good prisoner" was absolutely not going to affect his parole, he became increasingly militant. He read Malcolm, Stokely Carmichael, and pasted pictures of revolutionaries upon his cell wall. He also imposed on himself a rigid revolutionary discipline. He has conditioned himself to only need three hours of sleep a night, he does 100 fingertip pushups every day, he studies and reads constantly, and subsists on one meal a day. He also learns three new words each day, and puts them into practice in his letters. He has written a steady stream of letters analyzing his situation and the situation of oppressed people in general. They are brilliant formulations on conditions in this country. They will be published in book form sometime this fall.

But none of this is why George Jackson is in the news. Early this summer, a white guard at Soledad Prison, in Salinas, California, where George was serving, killed five black prisoners "for fighting" in the prison yard. The murder was called "justifiable homicide". Two weeks later, the guard was found murdered himself. The prison authorities immediately rounded up all the black people in the prison ward where he was murdered, and put them into isolation for two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, they had selected the three most militant brothers to stand trial for the "crime". They shipped the rest of the prisoners to other prisons in California, and put the three brothers, -- Drumgo, Clutchette, and Jackson -- in solitary. They were not even allowed to contact lawyers, until one finally managed to get word to the outside, expressing fear for his life. Fay Stender, Huey's lawyer, with whom Jackson had been corresponding for some time, entered the case, and got a change of venue from Salinas, a sure conviction, to San Francisco (the government's now trying to change it somewhere else--too many oppressed people in San Francisco).

A heavy part of Jackson's correspondence was to his younger brother, Jonathan. On August 7 Jonathan Jackson, along with two others, were shot to death in Marin County, California, after abducting the trial judge and holding several jurors at gunpoint, in an attempt to free the Soledad Brothers, the first such attempt by revolutionaries in this country. Jonathan Jackson had suffered for ten years the anguish of seeing his brother turned down time after time for parole on a crime he did not commit, and decided to seek a more direct form of justice. (This entire story is covered on page 33.)

...The brothers are now in San Quentin, awaiting trial, which will probably be this fall. It is an extremely important trial to educate people in this country about the racist, fascist nature of the so-called "legal system". They are going to try to send the Soledad Brothers to the gas chamber.

George Jackson, as this letter will show, is an incredibly articulate spokesman for the liberation struggle.)