The Antisocial Socialist

Today marks the 45th anniversary of the Attica uprising, and the beginning of a prisoners' strike across the US.

A what?

See, what a lot of people don't seem to know is that slavery never ended in the States. Oh, sure, there was that bit with the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement and post-racial Obama, but slavery is still perfectly legal. You just need to be in prison. If you're in prison, the 14th Amendment makes an exception for you. You're also stripped of voting rights and you're likely to be subjected to what we would consider cruel and unusual punishment if, say, a communist country did it. The very fact that prison rape jokes can be a thing tells you how barbaric the attitude of most North Americans is when it comes to those behind bars.

"But wait," you cry—well, not you, you know better—"aren't these rapists and murderers paying for their crimes against society?"

Not most of them. A system exists in the US where simple lawbreaking that most of us do—say, getting a traffic ticket, or having a small amount of drugs*—can compound and compound until it lands you somewhere incredibly unpleasant. Needless to say, this does not tend to happen to white people and it frequently happens to racialized people, especially black people—you know, the ones who were historically enslaved. "I'd never break the law," someone not-you might say. Chances are you have and it just wasn't caught and enforced. But when a population is as much under scrutiny as Black and Latinx Americans, if they wanna find something on you, they'll find it.

And then it's legal to make them work for free for hugely profitable corporations like Victoria's Secret, Whole Foods**, Wal-Mart, McDonald's, and AT&T. (Here's a campaign dedicated to identifying and boycotting which companies employ slaves.) You maybe saw something about that on Orange Is the New Black, but it's way worse in real life. So much so, even, that I'd wager a lot of the American economy is dependent on slave labour, the way it's dependent on under-the-table labour from non-status immigrants.†

If you're interested in learning more about why the prison strike, and why today, here's a great cartoon from the Nib that breaks down the issues and context.

And if you, like me, are interested in knowing how it's going, what's happening right now, whether there's repression or progress and whether there's anything you can do to help—well, good luck. The news is crickets. Even Twitter is crickets. If someone has any info, please share it

* Not me, CSIS. I'm clean as a whistle.
** Fuck those smug libertarian crunchy shitbags with a rusty spork.
† Canada's not any better, particularly when it comes to dependency on exploited immigrant labour, but this is specifically a post about American prisons.

I support them and all that, but I do hope the CBC strike ends soon. It's killing my mornings. It's bad enough that I have to get up with a hangover. But I have to listen to this:

Bad pop music
Bad pop music
30 seconds about Gaza
Bad pop music
Weather report for Nunavut
Bad pop music

Ugh.

Speaking of which -- here's a not-so-hypothetical situation. Imagine there's a Canadian factory with a contract to manufacture and sell bullets to the US Army. Those bullets are going to be used to shoot Iraqis. The workers at the factory go on strike; their demands do not mention the war. Do you:

a) Support them in their demands because they're striking workers?
b) Do picket-line support for sure, but make sure to discuss the war with them in some way?
c) Don't touch this situation with a ten-foot pole. You wouldn't do strike support for prison guards, either.

And why?