Genuinely a massive problem with “abolitionist” rhetoric is that you are so easily able to be tricked into an argument in which you have to make a perfect outline of a utopian society to please your opponent rather than talking about any of the evil shit that actually exists. It’s not that we shouldn’t have radical aspirations, but it matters a lot how you frame these things in your own thinking. The prison industrial complex is evil beyond description and needs to be destroyed, but that’s not going to happen in a way that keeps the rest of modern liberal society intact. Our job isn’t to try to convince people of our grandest aspirations for society, it’s to do everything in our power to make it so the working class exists as a class for itself. The rest will come later.
“The key to understanding the whole materialist conception of history:
All manifestations of the real world, in which we live as thinking and acting (or rather, as acting and thinking) Men decompose [first of all] into two large main groups: on one side we, and everything that is, belong to a world that we represent to ourselves as being given as ‘Nature,’ i.e. as a world which is totally independent of our thought, desire/wills, and work/effectivity. On the other side, we stand as thinking, desiring/willing, acting Men at the same time in a world upon which we exert practical impact/effectivity and whose practical impact/effectivity we experience, and which we therefore must perceive as being essentially our own product, as well as being ourselves its own product. These two worlds: the natural world on one side and the historical social practical world on the other side, are however not two separate worlds, rather one and the same: their unity lies grounded in this: that they both lie embedded in the passive-active life-process of Men, who constantly reproduce and further develop their entire reality through/in their specialized cooperative work/effectivity and thinking.” – Karl Korsch
At 1 AM a distant train horn echoes through some nameless place. Here, sidewalks end prematurely. Here, lights of unused storefronts burn. Here, the human animal levels forests to make a clearing. White walls and ceilings erected over wood paneled floors. 2 AM when the TVs are off. Stand alone below the drywall archway. Here, the pure silence fills your soul. Decade after lonely decade.
um er the weathermen set back the US left with their adventurism
They fucking bombed the pentagon at the height of the Vietnam war and destroyed classified war documents plus they didn’t even kill anyone. What the fuck did YOU ever do faggot?
“Our country was murdering millions of people; this revelation was more than we could handle. We didn’t know what to do about it, it was too great a fact. Every second of my life from 1965 to 1975 I was always aware that our country was attacking Vietnam. I could be up in the mountains, I’d be thinking about the war in Vietnam. I could be taking an acid trip and I’d be thinking about the war in Vietnam.”
Mark Rudd of SDS and the Weather Underground Organization
