Hey, we're going to meet in about an hour 45 minutes and I wanted to remind you about it, and also send along some quotes that I thought about while reading "Attica Is" (chapter 3 of Tip of the Spear).

quotes & reflections

“They were causing destruction, but it wasn’t my kind of destruction,” he recalled. “I wanted to blow the joint up!” Bugs’s expressed desire conjures Fanon, who wrote that in the opening stages of anticolonial war, “to blow the colonial world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colonized subject.” (page 87)

...

I asked Bugs why he blew up the chapel. He responded that the church had no significance whatsoever, that he targeted it simply “because it was there.” (page 88)

Sarah Haley, who offers the concept of sabotage for thinking about calculated, agentic, targeted acts such as the leveling of Attica’s chapel. Haley writes that although sabotage mobilizes “the will to break and transform rather than to tweak,” (page 88)

Dalou Gonzalez, a Third-World Marxist, once said, “I don’t advocate abolishing prison. What are we going to do with the Rockefellers and the Nixons and shit?” (page 95)

On one side were the poor and dispossessed masses struggling to eke out an existence across the globe. On the other were the “super-rich,” their corporate empires, and their “racist reactionary state machinery.” However, a large fraction of the populace, especially those who the authors call “black reform integrationists and white liberals,” were confused about the nature of their struggle and the methods needed to win. (page 96)

There are a lot of challenging elements to this chapter, not least among them being the execution of Michael Privitera (where, in the footnotes, Burton references that he may have been killed because he was a witness to the killings of the traitors Schwartz and Hess, and was not trusted to "keep his mouth shut"). But for me what resonates most strongly is the cathartic sense of justice that animates the Attica rebellion. I'm especially taken by Sarah Haley's thinking about sabotage, and about the idea of deliberately breaking and transforming.

I found myself challenging Burton's interpretation (and even Bugs's own answer) on page 88 when Burton asks Bugs about why he destroyed the chapel ("because it was there") - I think to myself about all of the complicit actors in authoritarian and genocidal violence, and I think about how treacly and self-satisfying it is for the collaborators in violence to tell themselves that what they're doing is safe from targeting, or safe from violence. I think that if the prisoners come to see the chapel as yet another collaborator, or yet another conspirator in the state's war against them, then that's an understandable reaction, isn't it? Destroying the chapel in the same wave of cathartic sabotage and breakdown and transformation doesn't seem all that questionable to me.

I realize that's a sensitive thing to say. I think what I'm trying to get at is that it seems inauthentic (or at least not all that persuasive) to say something like "the chapel was a neutral space" - like, says who? The very same people who were violently oppressing the rebels? The people who were going to kill these rebels as soon as the rebellion ended and they reclaimed control of the prison? Am I supposed to be convinced by that?

One last thought: I'm a little disappointed by how much the quote from page 96 about the super-rich corporate empires and their "racist reactionary state machinery" was an obstacle - or an antagonist - on the landscape in the 70s, and remains just as succinctly articulated today. I wish I could say that I found some solace in being engaged in a fight for liberation that arguably has become an intergenerational tradition; but at this particular moment it just makes the point more salient that we fight not for our own lives, but for the lives of some future generation that might finally emerge from the wreckage of capitalism finally (finally) destroyed.

video chat details

In about an hour 45 minutes (at 12pm ET) let's get together¹ and chat about whatever we've read this week. The link to join is here (if that doesn't work, the url is below)

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

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