I think this is why it's so important to
link the prison industrial complex to
global capitalism. That was the
intent from the beginning but we don't
always do the work we need to do
in order to promote popular awareness of
the extent to which capitalism is
really responsible for this predicament
we find ourselves in today. And
organizations on "the Left" have not
always taken into consideration how
important it is to understand the
relationship between capitalism and
these apparatuses of repression assuming
that, "Oh we have to focus our attention
on the economic system and once we
dismantle the economic system then all
will be well racism will have
disappeared", and we know that that
doesn't work and this is why I think
the Left is in such disarray today. And
in a sense that may be a good thing
because in the past there has been the
tendency to assume that party
formations, Left parties, have the answer
to how to engage in revolutionary
struggle and then everything else is
epiphenomenal. And I think that what we
have demonstrated is that one can be
involved very deeply in an issue such as
prisons but the analysis of the
prison industrial complex precisely is
an analysis of capitalism and we begin
to recognize that we can move
from one particular aspect to the whole
system. I think that movement from the
particular to the general is really
important, I mean feminism makes that
kind of argument you know, "If you're only
if you're only talking about women
you're really not talking about humanity",
and of course feminism makes the
argument that in addressing issues
that have to do with gender that have to
do with gendered structures then we
begin to to recognize what it means to
transform the whole. You know, the
same thing with Black Lives Matter.
There are those who just automatically argued, "Well
we can't talk about one small group of
people, like you know Black lives, we have
to talk about all lives", but we know that
if Black lives ever really mattered then
all lives would matter so that
movement from the particular to
the universal I think is
something that the Left has to
really recognize. And when I said
before that it may be a good thing that
the Left is in disarray
now, I meant that we are in the process
of developing new ways of of moving
toward revolution, ways that that don't
necessarily recreate the very
hierarchies that the revolution is
supposed to dismantle. I mean, I think
about South Africa and how what a beacon
of light South Africa was and how South
Africa was supposed to be
the evidence said it was possible to
make revolutionary change and of course
it was important that the apartheid
movement was dismantled but there's
the issue of the police and the
prisons continued to plague South Africa
and I think well what you know what if
we had had that kind of analysis
beforehand, what would South Africa look
like today? And so it's a process, I think
it's a process but I absolutely agree
that we have to think very explicitly
about making the connection between the
work that we do on the ground and the
eventual radical, revolutionary
transformation of our worlds.
