MUMIA SPARED! No Death Penalty For Mumia Abu-Jamal
Written by Associated Press
PHILADELPHIA — Prosecutors have called off their 30-year battle to put former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal to death in the killing of a white police officer, putting to an end the racially charged case that became a major battleground in the fight over the death penalty.
Flanked by the police Officer Daniel Faulkner’s widow, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams announced his decision Wednesday.
“There’s never been any doubt in my mind that Mumia Abu-Jamal shot and killed Officer Faulkner. I believe that the appropriate sentence was handed down by a jury of his peers in 1982,” said Williams, who is black. “While Abu-Jamal will no longer be facing the death penalty, he will remain behind bars for the rest of his life, and that is where he belongs.”
Abu-Jamal was convicted of fatally shooting Faulkner on Dec. 9, 1981. He was sentenced to death after his trial the following year.
Abu-Jamal, who has been incarcerated in a western Pennsylvania prison, has garnered worldwide support from those who believe he was the victim of a biased justice system.
The conviction was upheld through years of legal appeals. But a federal appeals court ordered a new sentencing hearing after ruling the instructions given to the jury were potentially misleading.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to weigh in on the case in October. That forced prosecutors to decide if they wanted to again pursue the death penalty through a new sentencing hearing or accept a life sentence.
Forty-two years ago today, Fred Hampton was murdered by the Chicago Police Dept. with FBI cooperation.
As Deputy Chairman of the Black Panther Party’s Chicago chapter, he brought about a truce between various street gangs in Chicago, organized weekly rallies, worked with the BPP’s local People’s Clinic, taught political education classes, and launched a project for community supervision of the police.
He was twenty-one years old when Chicago police gunned him down in his bed, after he had been drugged by his bodyguard, who was an FBI operative. Despite their attempts at a cover-up, Chicago Police Dept. were exposed in the documentary “The Murder of Fred Hampton” which we have provided below in its entirety. This film does not only reveal the lengths to which Chicago PD, along with the FBI, went to kill Fred Hampton, and destroy the Black Panthers, but also portrays his talents as a speaker, organizer and thinker who was tireless in his efforts to fuse revolutionary politics with the people.
This piece is available as podcast. It is part of our larger Kasama offerings on peoples’ history.
The Puritan colonists of Massachusetts embraced a line from Psalms 2:8:
“Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.”
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by Mike Ely
Intro to that first occupation
We are talking widely among ourselves about “occupying” Wall Street — taking the center of an empire back for the people of the world. We are talking about “Occupy Everything” — sharing our dreams of taking all society away from banks, police, and the heartless authority of money. We hope this moment marks a beginning of the end for them.
And yet, just such a moment cannot be understood without remembering that other occupation — the one that marked the beginning of their beginning.
Arrogant invaders occupied a land using the most naked forms of genocide. They invented new forms of slavery, slave trade and profit making. They arrived with their high-tech arms and bibles. They declared all was theirs by divine right, while they took it all with raw force.
Put another way: That first occupation was a sweeping nightmare that starts with Columbus. It has continued for 500 years. For the Native peoples of today (and therefore for us too) it remains an ongoing story of domination and removal. The nation-state who today labels millions of indigenous descendants “illegal aliens” arrived in boats with only royal decrees and their holy book as documents of legitimacy.
Every schoolchild in the U.S. has been taught that the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony invited the local Indians to a major harvest feast after surviving their first bitter year in New England.
Here is the true story of that Thanksgiving — a story of murder and theft, of the first “corporations” invented on North American soil, of religious fundamentalism and relentless mania for money. It is a story of the birth of capitalism.
This piece is intended to be shared at this holiday time.
Pass it on. Serve a little truth with the usual stuffing.
This Kasama site has recently been accused by the Revolutionary Communist Party of setting up their members and leadership for state repression.
The RCP’s recent statement is called “Outright Piggery from the Camp of Counter-Revolution” — so their charge is right in the title.
Extreme accusations demand a response.
Here it is: These claims are utterly false. The RCP does not give examples, evidence or proof of their accusation because they have none.
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Here is their central charge:
“Specifically, including very recently, there has been a whole practice of naming individuals who are identified on the Kasama site as being connected to the RCP, and then encouraging people to try to find out about individuals, their relationship to the Party, and speculation about the composition of different bodies and membership in the Party. And there has been an ongoing campaign of posting ad hominem (personal) attacks on Bob Avakian in particular. This alone puts it in the same camp as reactionary and vicious right-wing blogs and websites, doing the work for government agencies whose mission is to collect this kind of information which is then used to destroy individuals and organizations they deem to be a threat.”
In fact: Kasama has published politicalcriticisms of the RCP. If that has been damaging to the RCP it is because their politics are self-isolating and unattractive.However Kasama discussion has never breached the security of any organizations.
“We must not be afraid to engage in the aesthetic renaissance which made the original communist experiments so appealing. It is too common to refuse irrationalist forms of evangelism by comparing them to the fascist propaganda machine (the aesthetics of which were, of course, co-opted from early communist movements) or to today’s capitalist marketing empire.”
I think this is important… and we don’t have a common language around this (and for that reason alone a lot of people first said “I’m intrigued, but I don’t yet know exactly what he is talking about.”)
These issues come up in many ways (including whenever posters, graphics, covers, design, symbolic logos, and banners are proposed).
JFSP, for example, opened with a question about the Oakland Strike poster Kasama prominently reprinted:
“Wasn’t the black cat an old Anarchist threat known as the sabo-cat, sabotage cat?”
Yes.
Or rather, to be more specific, the black cat is a contemporary radical symbol of struggle — that is lifted and continually reworked from the imagery of the early revolutionary movement Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
The following is an important and highly controversial document from the previous communist movement (of the 1970 and 80s). This is an argument against socialist revolution attempting to reclaim patriotism or nationalist symbols in a country like the United States. The essay was part of a major theoretical effort by the Revolutionary Communist Party in the period of 1979-1984 to break with rightist and patriotic legacies within the international communist movement. It contains extensive sections written by Bob Avakian during this period — one of the times when a younger Avakian was still pressing the envelope of communist thinking and making creative contributions.
This essay was first published in 1980 and has been unavailable for decades. It has been republished by the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line. It is part of an archival project making documents of the “New Communist Movement” available to revolutionaries today for study, evaluation and summation.
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On the Question of So-Called “National Nihilism”:
You Can’t Beat the Enemy While Raising His Flag
Can revolution in the U.S. today come wrapped in the American flag? Can we “claim it as our own”? Should a revolutionary party be motivated by a desire to “save America. . . from her rulers and for her people”? Can a class-conscious revolutionary in the U.S. “have pride in the true history of this country”? These are questions which have posed themselves again and again in the development of the revolutionary movement in the U.S. and are doing so today. In fact, similar questions of national pride and patriotism have historically been very important in the advances–and setbacks–of the international communist movement.
Earl Browder, the naked revisionist former leader of the Communist Party, USA gave his infamous answer to these questions in the mid-1930s when he coined the phrase “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” and said that the CPUSA was carrying on the revolutionary tradition of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and the like. Unfortunately, when all was said and done, Earl Browder was right about the CPUSA (though most certainly wrong about genuine communism) because the CP had completely taken up the program and outlook of bourgeois democracy. Such a stand may be American and definitely is bourgeois, but for a communist it is a thoroughly counter-revolutionary one, especially here in the imperialist USA in this, the era of proletarian revolution.
It is hard to find archeological evidence of thought.
We know from bones that modern humans, in our own specific form, emerged from other hominid groups about 200,000 years ago. And we know that they spread out from Africa later into Europe, Asia and Australia.
And we know, of course, from the masterpieces preserved deep in caves, that our ancestors invented art of great symbolic power.
Other highly successful hominid species have been identified (Neanderthal, Homo erectus, etc.), who made tools and even used fire to cook. But art, symbolic thought and perhaps speech of a sophisticated kind so far appear unique to our branch of the human tree. Now we are starting to date where, in our own development — that art and symbolic thought emerged.
[right: Rock and shell smeared with early human body paint, recently discovered and dated in Africa. Photo: Grethe Moell Pedersen]
[right: Blombos Cave is an archaeological site with significant information about the behaviour of our ancestors]
Now a new discovery — of a “paint factory’ creating body paint of red ocher, charcoal and animal fat — documents human artistic and symbolic activity far earlier than previously known. Again: this is among modern humans, not our Homo erectus predecessors.
I once saw an interview with a man from among the indigenous peoples deep within the Amazon basin. He was asked why his group painted their bodies in distinctive and imaginative ways. He said simply: “It is what makes us different from animals in the forest. They don’t do that. It makes us human.” Now we have signs that we have been making ourselves human in that way far far early that was previously known — in a dating that starts to approach the emergence of our specific species (Homo sapiens) itself.
This news appeared first in the journal science, and is reported in the two following articles: first from BBC, then from New York Times.
DATE: October 21-22, 2011 PLACE: 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor Conference Room SPONSORS: Center for Chinese Studies and Institute of East Asian Studies
Description
This conference takes up the global history of Quotations from Chairman Mao—perhaps the most visible, ubiquitous, and enduring symbol of twentieth-century radicalism. Conference participants will examine the production and adaptation of the “little red book” in China, as well as its circulation, appropriation, and impact around the globe. The pocket-sized Quotations from Chairman Mao was probably the most printed non-religious book of the twentieth century and by the late 1960s became the must-have accessory for red guards and revolutionaries from Berkeley to Bamako. The little red book’s worldwide circulation, in dozens of languages, is a testament to its historical importance, but until now there has been no serious scholarly effort to understand the Quotations as a global historical phenomenon.
Several people asked to have this 1969 Red Papers call for communist collectives posted from – so its ideas (and our own ideas!) can be discussed in their own thread.
This was a rather ground-breaking 1969 document — that shaped (in many ways) the formation of the previous communist movement.
It set important terms for an emerging communist movement — and strongly influenced even the radicals who went on to form other, opposing communist trends. And of course it became the basis on which the Bay Area Revolutionary Union grew into the national Revolutionary Union.
The document gives a sense of how that generation of communists’ “basis of unity” was being developed — and how communist collectives started formed.
We will excerpt the section on forming collectives, then follow that with the full document.
The power of a call
But first a few introductory comments….
I want to mention (again) the kind of impact a document like this can have. Lots of people were at that moment (1969) coming out of more liberal or at least less consolidated radical organizations — and were looking for a way to move forward. Red Papers 1 dropped at the same moment that SDS fell apart.
When I received (from afar) a copy of Red Papers 1, I was a seventeen-year-old college freshman. I read it over and over until the print started to fade — and until the many strange and difficult concepts were burned into my brain. It left me as a fierce partisan of its proposals. And I worked to circulate Red Papers 1 and 2 with everyone I met.
A year later (under the influence of this approach) I was in a revolutionary collective off campus (with people of quite diverse radical views), and working in a shoe factory. Our main work was organizing white working class youth to fight the system in ways inspired by the Black Panther Party, and to build a revolutionary anti-racist movement among them.
A year after that, I was in the Midwest, working with the Panthers there, and working in a steel forge.
And a year after that, I was (barely 20, but with a bit more experience) starting a protracted project with other communist organizers in the West Virginia coalfields.
These Red Papers and the line of march that they sketched took many of us in a common communist direction. It inspired us to understand the importance of a particular kind of urgent experimentation. It suggested a form of organization. It situated our work within the international communist movement of that time and within the history of previous revolutionary attempts.
We may not today write the same words. We have learned many things in the intervening year. And our conditions are quite different. But we want to aspire to the same impact, clarity and symbolic power.
Acheulean tools and the associated culture represented a huge leap in sophisticated technology for humanity — and basically took over the world, as Homo erectus spread out of Africa and took that Acheulean hand ax with them. Now we have a fresh discovery about the origins of that Acheulean breakthrough.
It is hard to overestimate the importance of this hand ax which enabled humans to create fire wood and shelter in new ways, and crack op the massive joints of large mammal kills for transporting meat. This was a tool that literally shaped human culture for a million years — and established humans as a global species.
Note: Our Homo erectus ancestores were highly intelligent compared to their predecessors but not restless innovators like us (Homo sapiens)– and it is also an interesting part of the story that this Acheulean culture and hand ax continued with few modifications for those million years. Successful in a high degree, and not challenged by constant new inventions.
And now we have placed its invention further back in time — getting a sense of its emergence, and with it our arrival as hominid.
One hallmark of Homo erectus, a forerunner of modern humans, was his stone tools, an advanced technology reflecting a good deal of forethought and dexterity. Up to now, however, scientists have been unable to pin a firm date on the earliest known evidence of his stone tool-making.
The road forward involves a necessary summation of the past. This becomes particularly poignant whenever people propose strategic plans today that echo things attempted (once, twice, several times?) in previous decades.
How do we regroup communist forces? What was the experience of dividing the previous communist movement into warring mini-parties? What were the important “lines of demarcation” that divided people? And which ones were important to observe and fight out?
Paul Saba has (together with many others) created the EROL (Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online). It is exploding with previously unavailable information — documents, memoirs, articles, and increasingly graphics/cartoons.
I have been participating (to the extent I can) by suggesting materials, critiquing some of the intros, and writing blurbs on experiences I was close to.
Each time I go to the EROL i’m stunned at the materials now available — and a bit overwhelmed by its complexity and detail. It is a case where some things are really trivia (not relevant then or now) while other things are truly gems being made available to a new generation. (And where I assume there will be debate over which is the trivia and which is the gem!)
I am hoping we can all help promote these materials — and help each other identify specific parts that remain relevant today.
I plan (over time) to share links that strike me…. and to give brief explanations of their relevance. Here is a first installment.
“The revolutionary worker doesn’t swagger or boast and has little sense of ego. He or she is serious-minded and self-disciplined. The revolutionary knows that like a strike, the revolutionary struggle must be a united mass struggle, and that it will take quite some time to succeed….
“In contrast to the proletarian’s practice and outlook, the lumpen schemes and preys upon others to acquire survival needs and personal wealth, which renders him or her indifferent to the effects visited upon others and society as a whole….
“Translated into the revolutionary movement, the lumpen tendency has some thinking that militant swaggering, posturing, and ”talking shit,” is acceptable behavior for revolutionaries, which is very wrong and demonstrates political immaturity and lack of a true proletarian outlook.”
“Democracy and Class Struggle publishes this paper of Comrade Kevin “Rashid” Johnson because a lot of the message in this article is relevant to the struggle in Britain in 2011. The question of a Vanguard Party and its engagement with the Lumpen Proletariat is addressed in this article,these are key questions in the current Uprising in Britain in 2011.”
Kasama is sharing this essay here without (as usual) endorsing this specific analysis. We are not previously aware of this organization, New Afrikan Black Panther Party. On Rashid’s own site the original name of this essay is “The New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter: Our Line.” More on Rashid and his writings can also be found on kersplebedeb‘s valuable website.
By Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson (Defense Minister, NBPP-PC)
Introduction
In this paper, we outline the political and ideological line of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter.
The NABPP-PC, an all Afrikan people’s revolutionary party, proposes through its work and example to spread its line to the general NABPP on the outside, and to all revolutionary-minded New Afrikans, and Ultimately to expand the Party into a broad international vanguard of all Afrikan people the world over. We are in full accord with the analysis set forward in ‘The Panther and the Elephant,” which this paper intends to further illuminate..
The Vanguard Party
As a vehicle for coordinating masses of people for action, organization is necessary. Planning is necessary, and so is assigning roles and tasks to those most capable of performing them, and holding them accountable for performing their assigned tasks completely and to the best of their abilities. Coordinating the activities of the active forces of the Afrikan Nation in America towards the achievement of full democracy and national liberation requires a genuine vanguard party based among the masses. No revolutionary or genuine national independence struggle has ever succeeded without a party to organize and coordinate the energy of the struggling people into focused result-oriented action.
In the last months the EROL archives has posted a rich new body of past communist writings. (EROL is the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-line) We extend special thanks to Paul Saba, whose work is so important to our ongoing project of communist summation.
The following is one of the few existing histories of the RCP,USA. It is that organization’s own history — though this document has been buried and forgotten by the organization that wrote it.
We will now make it available for critical summation.
There is a lot to say about the real strengths and real weaknesses of the previous communist movement. To even start to understand them, we all need a common sense of what that history was, and how it was viewed (at that time) by those involved.
This essay was written in the wake of the RCP’s split with the RWH — over an economist view of work in the working class, and over a (relatedly) conservative view of what constitutes socialism and our revolutionary goals.
There are many levels on which to approach this document, and many ways in which to assimilate it. For now, we in Kasama are simply offering it for study and discussion — as part of the appropriation of previous communist history, and as part of the reconception based on that experience.
(We would like to make this available in pdf format. If you create such a pdf, share it with us, and we will post it as a pamphlet.)
Important Struggles in Building the Revolutionary Communist Party,USA
by Bill Klingel and Joanne Psihountas, leading members of the Central Committee of the RCP
This history is written in the light of the struggle against the Jarvis-Bergman clique, opportunists (led by Mickey Jarvis and Leibel Bergman) who attempted a revisionist coup to seize leadership of the RCP, and failing that tried to wreck, and then led a split from, the Party in the winter of1977-78. In the course of this struggle, it became clear that a summation of not only the current struggle, but of previous line struggles that went into forging a vanguard of the U.S. proletariat would be extremely valuable. This summation was originally written as an internal document of the RCP and on the basis of discussion within the Party, it has been rewritten in some parts for publication.
Opposition and struggle between ideas of different kinds constantly occur within the Party; this is a reflection within the Party of contradictions between classes and between the new and the old in society. If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party’s life would come to an end. (Mao Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 317.)
These are the last days of Black August 2011…. remembering George today and forever.
I can still taste my own tears on the moment we heard the terrible news. I remember our meetings where we asked each other how we could fill his place.
Gina climbed on a table in the factory, stopped the line, and explained to fellow workers the bitter killing that had gone down. In darkness across our city (and many cities) people worked to spread the word — with posters, spray-painting….. And more. There was more.
Mao Zedong's road of protracted peoples war emerged in opposition to the Comintern's strategy of basing revolution on urban workers and using rural base areas to seize urban areas.
In the last months the EROL archives has posted a rich new body of past communist writings. (EROL is the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-line)
We wish to extend special thanks to Paul Saba, whose work has been tireless and extremely important to both our common ongoing project of communist summation and coming project of communist regroupment.
In the next few days, we will point out some of the remarkable documents now available online.But for the moment we will start here:
Over and over, we have received requests (on Kasama) for reposting a particular document: the Revolutionary Communist Party’s sharp and extensive critique of Hoxhaism.
This 1979 piece on Mao and Hoxha was one of the more effective and powerful polemics made on a number of key questions dividing the international communist movement in the late 1970s — in the wake of the counter-revolutionary events engulfing China after Mao’s death.
We have gotten these requests because the dispute between Maoism and Hoxhaism is one of the sharp historic collision points between creative Marxism and dogmatic Marxism — and because Hoxhaism concentrated a number of arguments for Comintern-era thinking that have maintained power within parts of the international communist movement.
This document is extensive, and we will simply make it available here. It was first published in the RCP’s theoretical journal The Communist #5.
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Beat back the dogmato-revisionist attack on Mao Tsetung Thought
Comments on Enver Hoxha’s Imperialism and the Revolution
by J. Werner
Introduction
Upon first examining Enver Hoxha’s new book, Imperialism and the Revolution, one is tempted to dismiss it as a petty and shallow hatchet job and refer the reader to the works of Mao Tsetung, which make clear that most of the charges hurled at Mao are simply the worst type of blatant misquotations, distortions and downright lies, and also refer the reader to the many Soviet criticisms of Mao which, while sharing the same method and most of the same arguments as Hoxha, at least have the virtue of a more systematic and well-rounded presentation of the revisionist line.
Hilda Erickson, Joe Hill's love, wrote a letter that might explain what really happened the night of the killing.
August 26, 2011–At Woodstock, Joan Baez sang a famous folk ballad celebrating Joe Hill, the itinerant miner, songwriter and union activist who was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1915. “I never died, said he” is the song’s refrain.
Hill’s status as a labor icon and the debate about his conviction certainly never died. And now a new biography makes the strongest case yet that Hill was wrongfully convicted of murdering a local grocer, the charge that led to his execution at age 36.
The book’s author, William M. Adler, argues that Hill was a victim of authorities and a jury eager to deal a blow to his radical labor union, as well as his own desire to protect the identity of his sweetheart.
A Salt Lake City jury convicted Hill largely because of one piece of circumstantial evidence: he had suffered a gunshot wound to the chest on the same night — Jan. 10, 1914 — that the grocer and his son were killed. At the trial, prosecutors argued that he had been shot by the grocer’s son, and Hill refused to offer any alternative explanation.
Mr. Adler uncovered a long-forgotten letter from Hill’s sweetheart that said that he had been shot by a rival for her affections, undermining the prosecution’s key assertion. The book, “The Man Who Never Died,” also offers extensive evidence suggesting that an early suspect in the case, a violent career criminal, was the murderer.
Hill, who bounced around the West as a miner, longshoreman and union organizer, was the leading songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, a prominent union that was widely feared and deplored for its militant tactics. He penned dozens of songs that excoriated bosses and capitalism and wrote the well-known lyric “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”
This was originally posted on NewsOne.
