The Dragon Has Come: The Legacy of George Jackson

Inspired by Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh, who met Harlem Garveyites, Korean nationalists and Chinese communists, George Jackson (1941- 1971) found within the California prison yards and cells — he was entombed in solitary confinement for seven of his ten years of incarceration — mentors for revolutionary struggle. The Vietnamese independence leader and guerilla fighter who helped to create the Viet Cong, Ho Chi Minh, describes how a prisoner becomes a dragon. George Jackson, referencing South American revolutionary who fought for Cuba, Che Guevara, describes how a Black prisoner can engage in an alchemy that turns a slave into a dragon.

As did Ho Chi Minh, George Jackson initially sought to play by the rules of diplomacy, negotiation and compromise, linking Third World liberationists as international phenomena. George Jackson politicized himself into being a hyper-intellectual. Reading avidly and widely to comprehend and dissect violence, Jackson sought a fulcrum from the site of prison to leverage an omnipotent oppressor that wielded more violence than the colonized, enslaved, and imprisoned could ever amass against their rulers and masters and guards.

To most the name George Jackson is either unknown or just a name to the majority of readers in the West, as they are starved of accurate information by the imperialist news organizations. The official story promoted by the ruling class in the United States is that George Jackson was a violent felon who was held in the most secure prisons in the country and was nevertheless capable of killing a guard at Soledad Prison. Jackson was put behind bars reportedly for stealing $70. He — like many of us — learned that being black need not be a badge of servitude but rather might be a banner for unyielding revolutionary battle, he was given a sentence of one year to life and maintained in prison for years in the most inhumane conditions. During his imprisonment he served the longest sentence of anyone who was given a one year to life sentence in California. He spent the rest of his life, eleven years, in prison, with seven of those years in solitary confinement. While in prison he dedicated himself to revolutionary ideals and became a member of the Black Panther Party. As he development as a revolutionary became more outright, he was murdered by the state sanctioned executioners ( pigs/correctional officers) as he was doing too much to pass the revolutionary fervor and teachings on to fellow prisoners.

Amongst the teachings of Jackson we can find a personal favourite book of his — Blood In My Eye. For much of his imprisonment, Jackson was isolated in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day. He devoted himself to study and acquired knowledge of various revolutionary leaders from Che Guevara to Vladmir Lenin and in this, his last book, he presents his analysis of armed struggle, class war, fascism, communism, and other topics related to politics and revolution. The major theme of the book is the failures of capitalism, particularly regarding to blacks in America, and the need to replace it with a socialist society through revolution. Jackson makes the point that it is truly only a small percentage of the population that benefits from capitalism, while those at the bottom are continually exploited and oppressed. At the basis of all of Jackson’s writings is the recognition that white capitalist society must be destroyed; that reforms will only work to keep the oppressive system intact. In fact, he states that if forced to define fascism in one word, it would be “reform.” The ruling class uses reforms to “mask the true nature of modern fascism” (p. 118). As I have said in previous articles, ‘fascism can only be countered with deliberate, conscious, and forceful organizing’. Jackson elaborates :

At its core, fascism is an economic rearrangement. It is international capitalism’s response to the challenge of international scientific socialism. It developed from nation to nation out of differing levels of traditionalist capitalism’s dilapidation. The common feature of all instances of fascism is the opposition of a weak socialist revolution. When the fascist arrangement begins to emerge in any of the independent nation-states, it does so by default! It is simply an arrangement of an established capitalist economy, an attempt to renew, perpetuate and legitimize that economy’s rulers by circumflexing and weighing down, diffusing a revolutionary consciousness pushing from below. Fascism must be seen as an episodically logical stage in the socio-economic development of capitalism in a state of crisis. It is the result of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and miscarried–a consciousness that was compromised.”

Jackson then goes on to stress the importance of unity in the revolutionary movement. With a unified front, the revolutionary cadre cannot be stopped. It is this very fact that has caused the division and racism that are sown into a capitalist society. Speaking on this, Jackson states:

The resentment and the seedbed of fear is patterned into every modern capitalist society. It grows out of a sense of insecurity and insignificance that is inculcated into the workers by the conditions of life and work under capitalism. This sense of vulnerability is the breeding ground of racism. At the same time, the ruling class actively promotes racism against the blacks of the lower classes. This programmed racism has always served to distract the huge numbers of people who subsist at just a slightly higher level than those in a more debased condition . . . Racism has served always in the U.S. as a pressure release for the psychopathic destructiveness evinced by a people made fearful and insecure by a way of life they never understood and resented from the day of birth. (p. 171–172)

The point is made several times that to build unity, first must come raising of consciousness. “We feed consciousness by feeding people, addressing ourselves to their needs, the basic and social needs, working, organizing toward a united national left. After the people have created something that they are willing to defend, a wealth of new ideals and an autonomous subsistence infrastructure, then they are ready to be brought into “open” conflict with the ruling class and its supporters” (p. 81). Jackson devotes a full essay to this conflict, as he offers strategy and tactics for urban guerilla warfare.

Because the worker is abused by capitalism by having a portion of the laborer’s output alienated. The price of the crops that the African slave/peasant worked so hard to produce is manipulated in order to exploit him. However, employment has always been regarded higher than unemployment for the obvious reason that having a job is a necessity for survival. Africans in America are denied access to the fundamental right — the right to work. They are, at best, sporadic employees who are the last to be employed and the first to be fired. The distinction between unemployed people and criminals cannot be drawn, as white Europeans in capitalist Europe frequently did. Walter Rodney articulates a similar analysis in his 1971 article about George Jackson. He stated that:

The struggle within the jails is having wider and wider repercussions every day. Firstly, it is creating true revolutionary cadres out of more and more lumpen. This is particularly true in the jails of California, but the movement is making its impact felt everywhere from Baltimore to Texas. Brothers inside are writing poetry, essays and letters which strip white capitalist America naked. Like the Soledad Brothers, they have come to learn that sociology books call us antisocial and brand us criminals, when actually the criminals are in the social register. The names of those who rule America are all in the social register.

The courage of black prisoners like George Jackson has elicited a response from white America. At the time he was murdered a small band of white revolutionaries has took a stand. The Weathermen decried Jacksons murder by placing a few bombs in given places and the Communist Party supported the demand by the black prisoners and the Black Panther Party that the murder was to be investigated. On a more general note, white liberal America has been disturbed. The white liberals never like to be told that white capitalist society is too rotten to be reformed. Even the established capitalist press came out with exposes of prison conditions, and the fascist massacres of black prisoners at Attica prison brought about by then Senator Muskie.

The efforts of black prisoners have had international repercussions. The framed charges brought against Black Panther leaders have been denounced and combatted by various movements around the world. Committees of defense and solidarity have been formed in places as far as Havana and Leipzig. OPAAL declared August 18th, 1971 as the day of international solidarity with Afro-Americans; and significantly most of their propaganda for this purpose ended with a call to Free All Political Prisoners.

Peoples liberation movements in Vietnam, Cuba, Southern Africa, etc., have held conversations with militants and progressives in the U.S.A. pointing to the duality and respective responsibilities of struggle within the imperialist camp. As Walter Rodney has said; the revolution in the exploited colonies and neo-colonies has as its objective the expulsion of the imperialists: the revolution in the metropolis is to transform the capitalist relations of production in the countries of their origin. Since the U.S.A. is the overlord of world imperialism, it has been common to portray any progressive movement there as operating within the belly of the beast. Inside an isolation block in Soledad or San Quentin prisons, this was not merely a figurative expression. George Jackson knew well what it meant to seek for heightened socialist and humanist consciousness inside the belly of the white imperialist beast.

For those who have just started reading revolutionary and haven’t come to know revolutionary violence as a legitimate response to fascism, George may not be the one for you. Jackson is quite jarring and passionately contends throughout the book that revolution must be led by the most marginalized folks in society (and their vanguard party). He states that Black people in America are the revolutionary class, and thus must lead revolution. While he advocates for cross-racial unity, he struggles with the reality that the major obstacle of a unified Left is white racism and anti-Blackness. As such, he cites the Black Panther Party’s “survival programs” as necessary to the building of a revolutionary socialist “Black commune” in America that can serve as the precipice for universal revolutionary change.

In August we commemorate past political prisoners like Jackson, Magee and others while fighting for the freedom of Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier, and Mutulu Shakur.