Approaches to Politics 4: The just man must go to prison...

[sabotabby]

 As always, if you're interested in context and sensible thoughts you can check out ioplokon 's post. 

I am inclined to think that no one should go to prison, but of course that's not exactly true. Certain things that are illegal, say, sex work or drug use or trying to save the world, are unfairly criminalized. Other things that are illegal, such as rape or murder, are fairly so, though one could debate whether prison is necessarily the most effective way of dealing with them. And some things that are legal, such as building a pipeline on stolen land, or cutting down the Amazon rainforest, or jerking around the global economy so that your buddies can make a quick buck, ought to be punishable with Forever Jail at the least, if not execution by space trebuchet into the fucking sun. If you're a 13-year-old kid torrenting an album, that's illegal, but if you are a huge corporation stealing the work of every creative person alive, it's not illegal, even though it is, like, illegal under current laws. So I'm not 100% a prison abolitionist. Smarter people about me have written about this; let's instead talk about civil disobedience, which is another free association my brain makes with this prompt.

I have a dear friend who, for years, was involved in Extinction Rebellion in [redacted country]. The strategy there was mass nonviolent civil disobedience; they would often deliberately try to get as many peaceful demonstrators arrested as possible to draw attention to the cause. Or to grind up the gears of the legal system. This is in contrast to many of the movements I've been involved in here, where they do not deliberately get as many peaceful demonstrators as possible arrested, but it happens anyway because we keep letting ourselves get kettled for some reason.

This technique has worked well in the past. Most famously, during the Spokane Free Speech Fights in 1909, the Wobblies would stand on a soap box (legal for the Salvation Army but not for anarcho-syndicalists) and give a speech, and the cops would arrest them. Eventually, the jail would get so full that they had to let everyone go. This strategy was effective because neither the prison-industrial complex nor digitized information and surveillance systems were advanced like they are today. These days, this would be a great opportunity for a private-public partnership to build a larger, supermax jail and profit massively per prisoner.

The other day, the Indigo 11, anti-genocide protestors who were violently arrested for the crime of putting paint on the wall of the worst bookstore in the country, were acquitted of all charges. Which is great news! But I wonder how many wasted hours, legal fees, disrupted careers, emotional trauma were suffered, and whether there might be a better way. At least here, and I assume in most alleged Western democracies, the state's strategy to deal with political expression that it doesn't like is to arrest people for charges that everyone knows won't stick. They then spend years grinding down the accused through the courts and disrupting the movement through house arrest and non-association conditions. By the time the person is inevitably free, their name has been dragged through the mud, they've been separated from friends and comrades, they've lost their job or education, and they're broke. You beat the rap but not the ride.

Add to this the context of the US, which could easily be exported here, even if the Tories lose. As the cases of Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil and Abrego Garcia show, in America you can be thrown in a secret prison for any reason, whether or not you violate the law. It's very clear that we will have to devote a lot of time to prisoner support and legal costs to free innocent people. Movement lawyers are going to be incredibly busy and GoFundMe's are going to be incredibly empty. We cannot fuck around with pretending the state has a conscience anymore.

Therefore I propose: No going to jail for justice if you can avoid it. Run, don't go limp. If you're going to get arrested, make sure you do so for a reason that justifies taking you out of the game for potentially years at a time. Do not make mass arrests at demos part of your strategy.

Comments

[ioplokon]

Yeah, idk, maybe if you are a celebrity it's worth it? But otherwise, there's nothing you can do for the movement in jail that you can't do outside of it.

However, I'll also say, if you do want to do civil disobedience, please don't go it alone.

Then again, I am also a coward who does not want to go to jail or be deported.

[sabotabby]

For me it's not even cowardly. I don't think it's useful to any movement I'm a part of for them to have to expend their resources on my defence. If they have to, if I have to, so be it, but it should never be a strategy. Unless someone is a celebrity and funding their own defence and can use it to draw real attention, as you say.

[ioplokon]

I guess in the American context, this is pretty moot now, since people are detained capriciously and without process. I will say, I think a lot of the tourists, students, etc who have been swept up in this have been doing a good job getting to the media & keeping the focus on what is happening + the people still detained.

I also saw the Maryland Senator is going to go to El Salvador to get his constituent back.

[sabotabby]

He is? That rules.

[ioplokon]

Yeah. I think this is probably also some personal risk to him, so I'm writing my Sens to be like, learn from him and also protect him...

[selki]

Good for Chris van Hollen! My senator! He also did some long-winded "questioning" of Cory Booker during his marathon, to give Booker's voice a few minutes rest.

[ioplokon]

If you have time, you should give him a little attaboy. I spend so much time yelling at mine for being useless, but I try to give positive reinforcement when they actually do something... And getting Garcia back is huge, both morally and politically.

[sabotabby]

I just...I want all of them back. But there are a few (the gay makeup artist, the 19-year-old) who I guess I've seen pictures of and feel especially devastated and terrified for, and Garcia is one of them, and I just wish I could break them out myself.

[ioplokon]

There is a reason they don't let anyone leave. I think if we get one, we'll get them all.

[selki]

Done!

[ioplokon]

Yay! Have your own atta of the gender of your choosing.

[selki]

:-) Thanks!

[ioplokon]

Don't know if you saw, but your senator has met with him. One step closer to getting him home - and the rest.

[selki]

Yes! I came across this paraphrase of senatorial stances today:
"Senator Murkowski: We're all afraid.
Senator Van Hollen: I have successfully negotiated with two dictators to find and meet with my constituent in a gulag in El Salvador." -- https://mindly.social/@MaryAustinBooks@mstdn.social/114356300731083557

[ioplokon]

The cowardice is frustrating, but hopefully admitting it is the first step to overcoming it for her. The costs of going along with Trump are only going to get higher. And, as Van Hollen shows, there is so very much to gain by standing up to him.

[dewline]

Yeah, this is a bit of a mess right now. Horrifically so at times, as you say.

You might well have a point.

[sabotabby]

I think about it a fair bit.

[used_songs]

Very sensible, long term thinking.

[sabotabby]

Having watched what friends have gone through, I gotta think practically about these things.

[symbioid]

I think this matches well with one of Ward Churchill's complaints about traditional liberal (he uses 60s Civil Rights protests as the example) activism (the "jail us" kind you refer to).

Hitler will not jail you. Fascists will kill you, this only works when you have a state that ostensibly believes in the rule of law, and tries to pretend it follows it. When the mask is off liberal tactics will not work.

I'd have to re-read, but yeah. It also seems to get at the point about the Imperial Center vs Colonized. Complacency in the center (and how if this keeps up more and more people are going to find themselves affected in ways they never thought) and at some point resistance will require more people to be more *active* in their resistance.

Or as Bob Marley said "He (sic) who lives and runs away, lives to fight another day"

[sabotabby]

I think about this with all the marches. There was this one Black TikToker (I'm not on TikTok so I don't know their name) who pointed out the difference in the treatment between 2020 BLM protestors and the Hands Off marches, and the cruelty of everyone celebrating how huge and peaceful the Hands Off marches were. Which is not to say that they're not important, because they absolutely are, but the point at which they could become real political actions with real consequences is also like, a point of no return. If that makes sense.

[dissectionist]

I’m always thrilled to see this kind of thing because I’ve been complaining about the “let’s get arrested” strategy for years. We’re not in the 60s anymore. Cops have gotten more clever and figured out that they can put conditions on arrested folks that mean they can’t do activism for years. Why in the hell do we want to keep taking activists out of activism for years by aiming for being arrested??

[sabotabby]

The best thing we can do for activism is to help activists unshackle themselves from the mindset that they're white hippies from the 60s. That shit isn't going to work anymore.

[smittenbyu]

yes - this same train of throught was discussed at our local meet these few weeks. Just do enough to be within legal limits of civil disobedience. But again, anything is being taken as disobedience. ugh.

[sabotabby]

The logical place to go from there is not being civil anymore. If you're going to wind up in jail anyway, make it count.

[numb3r_5ev3n]

Therefore I propose: No going to jail for justice if you can avoid it. Run, don't go limp. If you're going to get arrested, make sure you do so for a reason that justifies taking you out of the game for potentially years at a time. Do not make mass arrests at demos part of your strategy.
This was something I told The Matrix Cult when they started getting in trouble for things like writing bad checks. "If any of us go to jail, it should be for something that actually matters." But for them, writing bad checks *was* protest, because "money is just a construct."

Oh well.

[sabotabby]

WHICH IS A WHOLE OTHER THING like if your protest would only work if there's a mass movement (everyone stops paying their taxes to starve the war effort, etc.), but it's you and 5 friends, you are 1) going to get arrested for an incredibly stupid reason, and 2) it's not a protest.

[agoodwinsmith]

I confess that I am not even sure that street-filling protests are actually effective. I don't have a good idea for a replacement, but I think the street protest is a kind of pressure release that makes people feel they've accomplished something. I don't notice a change afterward.

I think some of the granular actions are way more effective. As rude as it was, the booing of the USA national anthem was effective because so shocking - and nobody was ready to arrest anybody. Also - the first time was spontaneous; no one planned it. I don't know how a group fosters spontaneity, but if they can: wow.

I am almost convinced that the Tesla actions began spontaneously. It soon relaxed into a standard protest structure, but it was more noticeable at the beginning because powered by such single-focus rage. I think the spray paint, while hot pink and fun, didn't add much. It gave the media a negative clip for not much payoff. The absolute trashing of privately owned vehicles bothers me because any one of us could have been fooled into buying one (except those sad excuses for trucks), and asking any one individual to pay the whole price for Elon's arrogance is too harsh. And, the spray paint is going to attract the kind of person who just worships chaos and destruction, and doesn't care about the reasons.

The police are ready for the Tesla actions, now, but I think that sort of fragmented, multiple location, almost strike-like action has power to be mined. I want more like that, but I don't know what they are.

[sabotabby]

No, I absolutely agree. The time for mass protests is when you're at the beginning of organizing, when you need to find out if there's actually a movement there, and when your opponent has a conscience. A great example is in the lead-up to the Gulf War II when Canadians turned out en masse against going. The government at the time could be swayed by the fact that joining an illegal war was going to be massively unpopular.

At this point, there is still a place for mass rallies, but that can't be the end of it. We're very beholden to the aesthetics of the 60s without remembering that it didn't work back then, either.

[smhwpf]

Yeah, totally, civil disobedience now I think can only work when it can totally take away the regime's ability to control the streets, and when the forces that are die-hard loyal to the regime are unable to hold the line due to the majority of the security forces refusing to support them or even changing sides. It can still happen, like in South Korea. But strategies based on symbolism, or fill the prisons, or shaming the ruers, or anything like that, not gonna work anymore.

[sabotabby]

No. They can build more secret prisons now.