Abolition

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http://counterpunch.com/thomson12312010.html


Can We Finish the Job This Time?



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How ironic is it that a partial abolition job—nineteenth-century abolition—is used by the brutes of leaderville to congratulate themselves on the fairness and justice of their killing machine. How ironic it is. The killing machine called democracy is always forged, forged (made and faked), in slave states like ancient Greece and antebellum America. After a few decades or centuries of these arrangements, people start thinking that if there’s overt slavery in the slave machine—and why wouldn’t there be?—no one wants to actually look at it. Get all that rape and whip stuff offsite, for chrissake. What’ll the neighbors think? Maybe the goddam Chinese will put up with it. They’re not even Christians.

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Every time we get somewhere in overturning the killing machine we get co-opted. In the nineteenth century we got rid of the visible whips and allowed blacks to sit in the back of the bus as long as they agreed to stay poor and get murdered now and then. The primary effect of nineteenth-century abolition was to keep whites safe from the reservoir of anger that might have brought real change. In the twentieth century blacks were allowed to the front of the bus and to the front lines in Vietnam, and their anger was neatly assimilated into the product loop and neatly diverted with The Franchise, as if getting to yes-vote were some great privilege: now they could have their blood signing the bottom line of the killing machine. By signing on to The Franchise, they were in effect agreeing to their own marginalization. Step right up. Vote if you’re stupid.

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Yet despite all of that, the sun shines most days, the ground lies ready for planting every year, and our community is right here. Despite the vast archipelago of prisons for storing black men and others so unlucky as to share their luck with black men (such horrors almost always beginning with non-violent drug non-crimes for each man). Despite the incomplete task of nineteenth-century abolition, which cleared the way to move slavery off-site into prisons and, in the last century, to distant prison-nations like China. Despite the endless taxes from the killing machine and the appalling spectacle of our neighbors paying without a murmur, as if the government—blood leaking from its every pore—were something to which we should ever give a single dime unless it has a gun to our heads. The gun is there. My murmur is here.

Prisons are something that bourgeois people support because they’re naïve. They think it increases their safety, but it does the opposite. Duh. Insert non-violent people in one end and what the hell do you think’s going to come out the other end? Mix a few psychologically unstable prisoners in, add a few psychotic guards, and you have capitalism—a means of production, of mass production of broken, angry people. Reap what you sow. And prisons are a microcosm of leaderville in general. All prisoners are p.o.w.’s in capital’s world war.

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I'm posting this to discuss the slavery business in our jails and prisons.

this post is not for discussing what the author thinks of Obama. so please don't go there. thanks.