Readers’ Views on: Iran and Philosophy of Revolution; Corruption of ‘Justice’; Prisoner Unity; Voices from Behind Bars
Pelican Bay hunger strike
Thoughts from the Outside: Football and capitalism
The reality of football was brought home when Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field. Football is a distraction every bit as crucial to propping up this system as circuses were in ancient Rome.
Thoughts from the Outside: ‘If We Must Die’
November 11, 2022Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” spoke to hunger strikers at Pelican Bay. We were dying anyway and had nothing to lose with our movement to end perpetual solitary confinement in California prisons. “If we must die,” let us fight back with Marx’s universal of what makes us human, freedom.
Prisoner strikes and struggles through Marxist-Humanist lens
May 19, 2022Commemorating the 10th anniversary of the historic prison hunger strikes that ended California’s permanent solitary confinement, Faruq and Urszula Wislanka give a retrospective/perspective on our involvement in prison issues with two talks on “Historic hunger strikes: 10 years after” and “Listening to women prisoners with Marxist-Humanist ‘ears’”
Thoughts From the Outside: Fred Hampton and the Idea of freedom
May 8, 2021A recent movie, “Judas and the Black Messiah,” tells the story of the state execution of Fred Hampton. The state terrorists were so interested in finding a Judas within Fred Hampton’s circle because Hampton was a powerful new young voice for human solidarity between various groups in Chicago.
Becoming new men
Since my release from the Security Housing Unit, it’s been an uphill battle to win the rights and freedoms that the prison bureaucrats don’t want us to have. Our objective has always been recreating liberation schools, but it’s a challenge even to get our own self-help groups.
Prison Truth
July 14, 2020Urszula Wislanka reviews the book “Prison Truth: The Story of the San Quentin News” by William J. Drummond. Prisoners’ humanity is not alone their individual transformation or “personal redemption” as a “human interest” story, as shown by the Pelican Bay hunger strikes.
Free Sitawa Jamaa
January 21, 2020It is more important than ever to free Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, one of the four main representatives in the historic 2011-13 hunger strikes initiated in Pelican Bay prison’s Security Housing Unit, after his stroke.
Free Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa!
November 10, 2019It is more important than ever to free Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, one of the four main representatives in the historic 2011-13 hunger strikes initiated in Pelican Bay prison’s Security Housing Unit, from prison as in early November 2019 he suffered a stroke.
Prison & Cesar Chavez
September 1, 2019Prisoner Trent brings memories of the United Farm Workers’ leader Cesar Chavez in connection with the Pelican Bay hunger strike.
Essay: How dead thought failed Syrian revolution’s living history
January 28, 2019The Syrian Revolution has been the physical and intellectual battlefield that defines our time. As early as 2012 it was clear that what happened in Syria would determine the next stage of world history.
Voices From the Inside Out: Learning the meaning of parole
December 3, 2018Prisoner Faruq writes of his pending parole and the obligation to fight the designation that prisoners are the “worst of the worst,” to fight the dehumanization of prisoners; he forwards the importance of prisoner activism in changing draconian conditions.
(In)justice system confronted
January 31, 2018Various prisoner support organizations gathered before an Alameda County Board of Supervisors Public Safety Committee hearing on jails and detention centers in November, 2017.
Solidarity with Folsom hunger strike
July 2, 2017Report on the 21-day hunger strike begun by prisoners at Folsom State Prison’s administrative segregation on May 26th.
Black Lives Matter
May 3, 2015The long-simmering outrage of Black masses has broken out into a movement against this racist society, particularly its pattern of racist killings by the police. It has not only reverberated internationally, but also made itself felt in the battle of ideas and the sphere of theory.
From Ferguson to Staten Island: The logic of racism is genocide
December 5, 2014Protests erupted after the cops who murdered Michael Brown and Eric Garner were let off. They mark a new moment of rebellion against a social order in which Black youth are made to live continuously suspended over an abyss of non-existence.
The passion to tear up this deeply racist society by the roots calls for the fullest development in activity and thought.