Hey, we're going to meet in about an hour and I wanted to remind you about it, and also send along some quotes that I thought about while reading the introduction and listening to the Turbulence podcast episode with Dr. Burton.

quotes & reflections

Tip of the Spear argues that prisons are war. They are state strategies of race war, class war, colonization, and counterinsurgency. (pg 3)

Tip of the Spear is my response to an intergenerational assignment that Eddie Ellis and others gave me nearly a decade ago. (pg 7)

"Attica" functions as a metonym for a temporally, geographically, and politically diverse structure of Revolt to which many roots and branches connect and extend in different, sometimes contradictory directions. (pg 9)

Although they erupted within prisons, these rebellions looked beyond them. As I will show, the fact that this is not widely understood today is an effect of prison pacification. (pg 14)

I had extremely cursory knowledge of the "Attica prison riot" - basically on the level that that's about all I knew about it - but I'd never thought about it in the broader context of international and interconnected parallel struggles in the way the introduction here lays out the book will demonstrate. Nor had I ever really considered prisons, or political prisoners, in serious depth as the actual tip of the spear - as Burton explores in reflection to Jalil Muntaqim's letter.

I'm also really fascinated and looking forward to reading more about the political warfare and the movement capture, the reformist absorption, etc... that Burton promises to unpack in this book. I realize the introduction of any book is full of promises and my imagination might be projecting a lot on the rest of the book, but I'm keenly looking forward to wherever he's taking us.

(Also, I didn't pull the quotes out, but I want to note that Burton quotes Ruth Wilson Gilmore in talking about "surplus populations" (which you might remember from Health Communism), and also references Fanon.)

video chat details

In about an hour (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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supporting The Sameer Project

If you can't buy Tip of the Spear from the bookstore, please consider making a donation directly to one of the Sameer Project's campaigns, or consider sharing a fundraiser with friends. If you can't do any of that, consider sharing the reading group with some friends; if some of them can buy the book from Open Books, or even make direct donations to The Sameer Project, then that would help enormously.