(2017) GEB Statement on the Misuse of Boston GMB Funds in 2016

Submitted on Mon, 09/18/2017 - 4:29pm

In 2016, $4,510.00 was illegitimately withdrawn and spent from the Boston IWW General Membership Branch’s bank account. This is a statement of what occurred in that case.

• Boston Area GMB
• General Administration

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Milwaukee, WI: General Defense Committee Rallies Against Islamophobes

Submitted on Tue, 09/12/2017 - 6:02pm

By The Milwaukee Industrial Workers of the World General Defense Committee Local 19 - It's Going Down, September 11, 2017

When the Milwaukee IWW General Defense Committee heard that Act for America was scheduled to have a rally in Milwaukee we immediately began organizing to oppose it with the goal of shutting it down completely. ACT for America is an organization that stokes fear and hatred of immigrants and Muslims to lobby for heightened national security. We spoke with Twin Cities General Defense Committee members who had opposed ACT for America in the streets previously. They told us that ACT for America drew Islamophobes and Trump supporters, with some Alt Right fascists thrown in the mix at a rally in St. Paul.

We knew we couldn’t let this organization take the streets of our city, so we organized logistics, started doing turn out and made a plan. ACT for America had scheduled their rally for 8 a.m. at the Federal Courthouse in downtown Milwaukee, so that’s where we would go. In the past several weeks debates on antifascism have erupted all over the country. Some suggest we ignore them, some suggest we hold rallies on the other side of town, but we believe that we must go where they go. We must always confront them with the goal of allowing no platform for racism and fascism. Shortly after masses of people in Boston smashed a fascist march, ACT for America canceled their rallies all over the country. Some questioned if we should bother turning out at all, but we felt we had to make good on our commitments and send a message to the far right that they would be opposed at every turn. We also knew there was a possibility that some rightists would turn out anyway.

We set two rendezvous points, one in front of the courthouse and the other two blocks away, so we could engineer a coordinated confrontation with the right if needed.But the right didn’t really show. As we gathered and began to march, a few right wing goons heckled us, but then quickly scuttled away. They must have turned up to assessthe scene. Across from the courthouse approximatelysixty people gathered as we heard from speakers on the importance of solidarity, the struggle living as an immigrant in America and the vile racism of our society. Speakers called for unity with oppressed groups and the importance of working class organization. A General Defense Committee member said, “ACT for America has tremendous influence not only over the average person where they can play on fears, but over the State as well. But appealing to representatives is a dead end; a fruitless act. We have to use collective action in our communities to build the power we need to stop this threat.”

As we build our organization we navigate a difficult path. We know that there must be mass opposition to fascism and racism in order for it to be combated, but we have to do what is necessary to no platform the far right. It’s a path worth navigating in order to build a mass organization that can utilize direct action.

Every day on the shop floor, in the school, and in the neighborhood, we must build working class self-organization. We have to have conversations about who is really responsible for the outsourced jobs at huge old Milwaukee plants like Allis Chalmers and Tower Automotive and who is responsible for the cuts to education, public service, food share, and transportation. The rich are the ones who suck the blood of our class. If we don’t have those conversations the right wing will.

• Milwaukee GMB
• General Defense Committee

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“Destroy All Prisons Tomorrow”: IWOC Responds to Jacobin

Submitted on Tue, 09/12/2017 - 5:57pm

By IWOC - It's Going Down, September 11, 2017

The weekend of August 19 2017, amid the second nationwide inside/outside mass protest against prison slavery in as many years, Jacobin Magazine published an article against prison abolition entitled How to End Mass Incarceration by Roger Lancaster. Lancaster argued that returning to an ideal of puritan discipline and rehabilitation is more realistic than pursuing the abolition of prison entirely.

Jacobin caught a lot of deserved flack from abolitionists on social media for it. Numerous scholars, organizers and journalists decried Lancaster’s article, creating such an online storm that Jacobin decided to publish a response article entitled What Abolitionists Do penned by Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba and David Stein. Unfortunately, this response fails to fully critique Lancaster’s arguments and instead sells other abolitionists out. Their thesis paragraph reads:

Critics often dismiss prison abolition without a clear understanding of what it even is. Some on the Left, most recently Roger Lancaster in Jacobin, describe the goal of abolishing prisons as a fever-dream demand to destroy all prisons tomorrow. But Lancaster’s disregard for abolition appears based on a reading of a highly idiosyncratic and unrepresentative group of abolitionist thinkers and evinces little knowledge of decades of abolitionist organizing and its powerful impacts.

The Lancaster article levies the typical straw-man critique of abolition as an unrealistic “heaven-on-earth” vision. He presents Michel Foucault’s vision of a carceral society from Discipline and Punish as an alternative aspiration and argues that “we should strive not for pie-in-the-sky imaginings but for working models already achieved in Scandinavian and other social democracies.” He accuses abolitionists of being “innocent of history” and “far out on a limb”  when comparing prison to chattel slavery.

These arguments expose a poverty of Lancaster’s analysis, and they are easily refuted. The idea that the US could adopt a Scandinavian style prison system through simple public awareness campaigns is desperately naive to the history of racial capitalism on this continent. The idea that a Foucauldian carceral society could exist here without massive quantities of racially targeted violence and coercion is far more pie-in-the-sky than the abolitionist recognition that prison depends on and cannot function without abominable levels of dehumanization and torture. Lancaster is the one with a utopian vision divorced from history, his prisons without torture or slavery can only be imaged by someone who hasn’t honestly grappled with the history of the US as a settler colonial nation that has always been existentially dependent on putting chains on Black people.

• Incarcerated Workers Industrial Union 613
• IWOC

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Incarcerated Workers #7

Submitted on Tue, 09/12/2017 - 5:51pm

By IWOC - It's Going Down, September 11, 2017

• Incarcerated Workers Industrial Union 613
• IWOC

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