Showing posts with label prisoners strike. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prisoners strike. Show all posts

Tuesday 24 July 2018

America, Land Of Slave Labour.

         Slave labour is alive and well in 21st century capitalism, captured in camps and forced to work for little or nothing is a way of life in that so called "leader of the free world" America. The country that marauds around the globe bombing other countries into oblivion while stating it is "liberating" them. It certainly is the world's leader in destruction abroad, and slavery at home. 
Incarceration in the United States is one of the main forms of punishment and rehabilitation for the commission of felony and other offenses. The United States has the largest prison population in the world, and the highest per-capita incarceration rate.[3][4] In 2016 in the US, there were 655 people incarcerated per 100,000 population. This is the US incarceration rate or adults or people tried as adults.[5][3]
        America accounts for approximately 25% of the world's prison population while accounting for only 5% of the world's population, and this gigantic prison population is milked by the American corporate world. Slavery on a massive scale, legitimised by the supposed leader of the "democratic" world. The word "democratic" sticks in your throat when mentioned in the same breath as capitalism. At the moment, approximately 2.3 million people are locked up in American prisons.
        Influenced by enormous corporate lobbying, the United States Congress enacted the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program in 1979 which permitted US companies to use prison labour. Coupled with the drastic increase in the prison population during this period, profits for participating companies and revenue for the government and its private contractors soared. The Federal Bureau of Prisons now runs a programme called Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR) that pays inmates under one dollar an hour. The programme generated $500m in sales in 2016 with little of that cash being passed down to prison workers. Stateside, where much of the US addiction to mass incarceration lies, is no different. California's prison labour programme is expected to produce some $232m in sales in 2017.
       These exploited labourers are disproportionately African American and Latino - a demographic status quo resulting from the draconian sentencing and other criminal justice policies ransacking minority communities across the United States. African Americans are incarcerated at a rate five times higher than that of whites. In states like Virginia and Oklahoma, one in every 14 or 15 African American men are put in prison.
  
 
        “Militant actions in support of the prison strike will send a powerful message of defiance to the American state and solidarity to rebels inside prison walls.”
From Revolutionary Abolition:
        On August 21st, people locked up in prisons throughout the United States are set to go on strike, calling attention not only to heinous abuses and inhumane conditions, but also to the ongoing enslavement of millions of people inside American prisons. After the Civil War, slavery remained institutionalized in American society through the constitution’s 13th amendment, which allows slavery to remain as punishment for a crime. In America, black people’s criminalization is enforced by police who frequently shoot black people with impunity and by judges who sentence black people to draconian sentences, ensuring their enslavement in modern-day plantations.
        Facing a situation meant to stifle any glimmer of joy and humanity, people in prisons across the United States are calling attention to the “lack of respect for human life that is embedded in our nation’s penal ideology” by courageously going on strike from August 21st to September 9th.
       The dates, chosen by prison organizers, signify the strike’s continuation with the legacies of Nat Turner, who began his rebellion on August 21, 1831, and the Attica Uprising, which began September 9, 1971. Nat Turner, who was born into slavery, took part in a major insurrection, freeing slaves from plantations and executing slave owners. The Attica Uprising, an important milestone for prison resistance in the United States, took place following the shooting of black revolutionary George Jackson by a prison guard during an escape attempt. Like Nat Turner and the Attica rebels before them, prison strikers today are fighting for black liberation and the abolition of slavery.
       Revolutionaries around the world should be aware of the struggle against slavery in America’s prisons. The Trump presidency is one of the most barbaric regimes in the world today, continuing a long legacy of racism, exploitation and genocide engrained in the American state. People in prisons rising up to regain their humanity are providing some of the most inspiring resistance of the Trump era to the horrifying, dehumanizing policies of America’s judicial system.
        We call on comrades around the world to join in solidarity actions with the prison strike in the United States. The American state and corporations that benefit from prison slave labor must be held accountable for their atrocities by revolutionaries through direct action in locations around the world. Actions targeting American consulates and companies benefiting from slave labor, and destroying symbols of American prison slavery will draw the world’s attention to the struggle taking place within the prisons.
        Militant actions in support of the prison strike will send a powerful message of defiance to the American state and solidarity to rebels inside prison walls.

Burn the prisons!
Support the prison strike!
Long live international solidarity!

revolutionaryabolition.
Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk


Friday 28 October 2016

Rebelling Against Slavery.

        The prisoners strike in America is still on-going, again the silence of the babbling brook of bullshit that is our mainstream media is its way of treating any resistance to this festering system. However, support across the world is there, but needs to grow, it needs the widest publicity possible. Posters, blogs, protests outside prisons, letters of support to the prisoners and any other form of support that will help shine a light on this courageous struggle by those trapped in the slavery of the prison system. For freedom to live, prisons must die.
A poster from Austria:
     The poster „Against Prison! Against Slavery!“ is a small contribution from anarchists in Austria to the global Week of Action from 15th to 22nd October.
We send our solidarity to all prison rebels!
Strength to the striking prisoners in the US and beyond!

Text from the poster:
THE BEST SLAVES ARE THOSE WHO BELIEVE THEY ARE FREE
      Every institution that tries to turn us into oppressed or handcuffed slaves are our enemy: fascism, patriarchy, authority, borders, the state and the capital!
Against Prison! Against Slavery!
     Prison was created by a social order based on domination and exploitation. The aim is to create a structure to segregate, repress and confine all undesirables. Until today the bosses make capital with forced labor in prisons, and control is increasing with little difficulty, while the politicians speak about liberty, equality and democracy.
Oppression, subtle and violent, is always inherent in a capitalist society. Acceptance of a miserable life among the exploited and oppressed makes capitalist production possible. An anti-nationalist consciousness, the rejection of democratic dictatorship and the fight against every polluted aspect of life is therefore vital.
     The starting point for truly explosive struggles is taking position, attacking the exploitation machinery, exposing cannibalistic governments, destroying militarized borders, intensifying social conflicts and building fertile structures for anarchist and non-anarchist people with common enemies and common targets on a global scale.
      Given that it is not a revolutionary tactic to spread fairy tales, we can’t just talk about getting away from it all. We must position ourselves along lines of various anarchist tendencies. The struggle we want to intensify includes revolutionary attacks and armed resistance.  Above all we express our solidarity with anarchist and rebellious prisoners through attacks for the total destruction of prisons and the prison society!
SUPPORT PRISON REBELS!
FIRE TO THE PRISONS!
LONG LIVE ANARCHY!

ANARCHISTS IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE PRISON STRIKE AGAINST SLAVERY
in German
Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk


Wednesday 12 October 2016

Slave Labour And Xenophobia, Diseases Of Capitalism.



        Weekdays are workdays at the Perry Correctional Institution in Pelzer, South Carolina, where Dee, a forty-two-year-old native of Georgia, has spent a decade serving time for a robbery. On typical mornings, he “commutes” from his cell to an on-site furniture factory, where he and other inmates assemble wooden tables and chairs for a private company. But when Dee’s cell door opened on September 9th, the forty-fifth anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, he did not respond as usual to the call to attention. Dee was on strike. “I quit,” he told me a few days ago, speaking via a contraband cell phone. “That was my last day of work.” Dee grew up poor and began committing crimes as a young man, but he had educated himself in prison and joined a group of “jailhouse lawyers” who assist other inmates with legal issues. More recently, Dee had begun to think of himself not just as a prison activist but as a worker. “We’re not compensated for our labor,” he told me. At Perry, inmates earn less than a dollar per hour in the furniture shop. “Slavery is inhumane, no matter its disguise.”

This from IWW member:
           As you might have come across, the IWW's Incarcerated Workers Organising Committee has been involved in an an ongoing prisoners' strike since the 9th of September in the United States (https://www.facebook.com/ incarceratedworkers/) . Companies profiting from the forced labor of prisoner include household names such as McDonald's and Victoria's Secret. I think that there is room for some solidarity actions that are not very time consuming or difficult to organise (such as picketing a central McDonalds and handing out leaflets) but which will nevertheless be effective in raising awareness of the strike and thereby actively aiding the struggle of IWOC and the prisoners. Even a small action, even if it has next to no impact, will be important for the morale of the persons involved in the strike and in the general picture of solidarity actions (that being said, obviously we should hope to have as big an impact as possible). A branch of IWOC exists for England and Wales which will I am sure give us lots of support -http://incarceratedworkers. noflag.org.uk/category/news/( leaflets, newsletters etc.).
            Additionally, a migrant strike is being organised under the title 'one day without us'- more information here https://www.theguardian. com/uk-news/2016/oct/10/ migrant-workers-plan-labour- boycott-to-protest-racism- highlight-contribution-to- britain
           Not much is known about this, but it is scheduled for the 20th of February, which gives lots of time for organising.
   Migrant workers picking daffodils in Linconshire. many people are alarmed by xenophobic attitudes to foreigners. Photograph: Alamy 
Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Friday 16 September 2016

There Is No Freedom While A Prison Stands.

 
      The latest from Stimulator TV has information on the Dakota pipeline resistance which has been gaining momentum and force, and the American prison slave labour system. You get the names of some of those large corporations that see the prison system as another branch of their business, probably the most lucrative section, as it is devoid of any workers representation, pays less than third world wages and no workers days off, no holidays, no insurance, no need for health and safety regulations, and punishment if you are seen to be slacking off.
      There is information on how to support the people on the inside, who are at present involved in what is probably, the biggest prisoners strike in American history. They need and deserve the support of all of us if we are to bring an end to this inhumane system of slave labour incarceration.


Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk