BLOOD IN MY EYES - GEORGE JACKSON

Another quick reread of a book I read in college. I wanted to use it for a project I’m working on and it turned out to be quite apropos for the current situation, sadly. Jackson, it goes without saying, is a total hero. Someone who’s life and death put into sharp contrast one’s own cowardice. He really lived his politics and died in a vain attempt to give us all a better world. His legacy is so powerful, still, that when Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote a statement about why he was going ahead with Tookie Williams’, the founder (not really, there will be an essay on this website soon explaining Tookie in more detail) of the crips, execution, he listed Tookie’s admiration for Jackson as proof that he wasn’t reformed and deserved to die. Think about that. Just admiring Jackson is cause for denying clemency. It’s hard to image another 20th century American figure like that. The other 60’s radicals, even the assassinated ones like Malcolm X have been sanitized to a degree that frankly isn’t possible with Jackson. He didn’t have a non-militant or accommodationist bone in his body. This is his second and slightly less famous book, written right before his assassination. The official story is that he died during an escape attempt, but there’s a lot of fishy stuff about that story that hopefully someone will dig into one day. Jackson spent his entire adult life in the California prison system, which makes this book all the more remarkable. The later section of the book is a quite erudite study of the history of fascism, particularly in Italy, where he discusses so pretty obscure (at least to me) Italian thinkers from all sides which is both intellectually interesting and flabbergasting when you consider that he learned all this under the genocidal thumb of the California department of corrections. The beginning of the book is much more focused on ideas of guerrilla warfare and communist uprisings. He, I would say correctly, pushes the MLM line that a vanguard party is needed to wage a people’s war, that the masses themselves are not going to do it. I would disagree with him when he says,“The outlaw and the lumpen will make the revolution. The people, the workers, will adopt it. This must be the new order of things, after the fact of the modern industrial fascist state.” I think that history has shown that this isn’t the case, the lumpen are quite easily distracted by personal material gains and, since they aren’t involved in production on the societal level, they don’t really have any leverage against the state. But these are minor quibbles. This level of radicalism is needed now more than ever, it’s insane how far we’ve fallen since he died, how little of this type of attitude we have left. The ICE pigs are killing on camera with total impunity. No one, and I'm including myself here of course, is striking back. We’ve so internalized the There Is No Alternative line that all we can do is non-violently protest and appeal to our rulers, who we now know (and learn more about every day) are psychopathic pedophiles. A grim place to be. But we have to also take Jackson’s attitude that it’s always worth fighting. He was in a worse spot than us and never gave even an inch. It’s hard to imagine how American and thus the world would have been different if he’d pulled off the escape, or been released due to pressure, and had been free during the turmoil of the late 60’s/early 70’s.