Revolutionary Arts with Signal Journal + Abolition with Mwalimu Shakur

Josh MacPhee & Alec Dunn on Signal 08

Mwalimu Shakur on Abolition, Organizing and Education

Then, you’ll hear most of a conversation with imprisoned New Afrikan revolutionary socialist, Mwalimu Shakur currently incarcerated in Corcoran Prison in CA, about abolition, political education and the hunger strikes of 2013 in which he participated. [00:45:14 – 01:12:37]

• Mwalimu Transcript
• Mwalimu PDF (Unimposed)
• Mwalimu Zine (Imposed PDF)

Mwalimu Shakur Links

• Mwalimu’s Instagram
• Past interview with Mwalimu
• Mwalimu’s writing on KnockLA and SFBayView (1, 2)
• Interviews about CA Hunger Strikes in 2013 with Ed Mead of CA Prison Focus (1, 2)

You can get in touch with Mwalimu:

Terrence White #AG8738
CSP Corcoran
PO Box 3461
Corcoran, CA 93212

Sean Swain

Sean‘s segment [01:12:40 – 01:20:01

Announcements

BRABC Letter Writing

Join Blue Ridge ABC on the first Sunday of each month, next up being August 6^th from 3-5pm at the NEW Firestorm spot at 1022 Haywood Road, in West Asheville. And swing by our table at the ACABookfair August 12-13 at Different Wrld to get involved, get a poster for the upcoming International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners and check out the other awesome stuff.

ACABookfair

If you’re nearby, consider a visit to the 3 days of event around the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair in Asheville from August 11-13 with tons of speakers, publishers, music and more. https://acabookfair.noblogs.org

Dr. Mutulu Shakur, ¡Presenté!

New Afrikan revolutionary elder, accupuncturist and revolutionary Dr. Mutulu Shakur joined the ancestors at the age of 72. He was released by the state after 36 years in prison, organizing, healing, educating and inspiring despite having developed a virulent bone cancer. Dr. Shakur spent the last year on this planet continuing his work, speaking and attending events, surrounded by loved ones. Rest in power.

Ruchell “Cinque” Magee Will Be free!

Politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, Ruchell “Cinque” Magee, is slated to be released after 67 years in the California prison system. Cinque is 84 years old, arrested on an indeterminate sentence around a marijuana charge from 1963, he joined the attempted jailbreak during the Marin County Courthouse shootout in which Jonathan Jackson attempted to free William A. Christmas and James McClain. Ruchell was the sole survivor and was a co-defendant of Angela Davis until their cases were split. There is a fundraiser to support Cinque’s post-release needs as an elder: https://fundrazr.com/82E6S2

Rashid’s Treatment Resumes, Thanks To Support!

As an update to past announcements from Kevin “Rashid” Johnson of the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party, the public pressure from calls & emails apparently had the desired results and as of a few days ago he was receiving the medical treatment he needs for his prostate cancer, though he hasn’t received all of his papers so he can continue to pursue his lawsuits against the Virginia DOC since they were confiscated by prisoncrats, but he’s super thankful for public engagement to defend his health. More updates on his case can be found at rashidmod.com

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Featured Tracks:

• Don’t Play Around (Instrumental) by DJ Nu-Mark from Broken Sunlight Series 6
• Black Hole by The Bulletproof Space Travelers from Urban Revolutions – The Future Primitive Sound Collective

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Signal 08 Transcription

TFSR: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today. Would you mind introducing yourself and giving your preferred pronouns as well as any affiliations that you think might be relevant to our conversation?

Alec: My name is Alec Dunn, I use he/him pronouns and I’m one of the co-editors of Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics & Culture as well as a member of the Just Seeds Artists Cooperative.

Josh: And my name is Josh MacPhee, I use he/him pronouns, and I’m also a co-editor of Signal with Alec. I’m also a member of the Justseeds artists cooperative. And I’m part of a project here in Brooklyn, New York, called Interference Archive, which is a public-facing archive of the culture and material produced by social movements.

TFSR: Can you tell the listeners about your respective backgrounds as it relates to this work?

J: Both Alex and I came up in the do-it-yourself punk scene and subculture and were politicized through that. I got my start making applied art, design, and graphics by working with bands and people in the punk scene, doing t-shirt designs and record covers and flyers for shows. And then tattoo designs and other things. Then got involved in self-publishing and zine publishing. And then a lot of the skill sets were born out of that, dovetailed into very similar parallel work but with community and social justice organizations, which is where a lot of the cultural work that I do now is focused.

Alec: I don’t really have a lot to add there, so I’ll just say probably the same thing. Josh grew up in Boston and spent time in DC and Ohio, and I grew up on the West Coast in Portland, and maybe there are regional differences, and had spent time in New Orleans. But both of us got the basis for design out of being around music scenes, and punk especially, but both of us were always doing political graphics. Even when I was a teenager in high school, they were crude, and I wouldn’t want anyone to see them necessarily, but it’s been a long interest and hobby and passion.

TFSR: Okay, based on my research, Justseeds has been around for 25 years at this point. Can you tell me a little bit about the evolution of the project? And at this point, can you talk about what exactly Justseeds encompasses in terms of the work that you all do?

J: Following up on some of these background questions, starting in the mid-1990s, I and a lot of people who were doing similar work to what I was doing started producing material for different movements. And the context back then, 30 years ago, particularly the economic context, was really different. Most of the organizations that I was working with had very, very small budgets, and a focus on art and culture was not really part of the program. They were interested in and I worked with groups to design posters and T-shirts and things like that. But there was rarely much money to pay for those things. I started getting paid in material. So I would design a poster for an organization, and they would give me 100 posters. Then I would design a t-shirt for a march or a rally, and I would get a stack of T-shirts. And then while doing that work, I was making parallel work on the side around similar issues: around mass incarceration in the United States, around housing, around solidarity issues internationally, anti-war.

Starting in 1997-1998, I realized that it would be really nice to actually be able to make some portion of a living doing this work, rather than just working a day job. At the time, often, I worked an overnight job at a coffee shop, which was called Kinkos, which was a central hub for both zine culture and punk culture and lots of different music subcultures and political self-publishing. But rather than just doing those things, it would be nice to actually make part of a living doing the work that I loved. And so I started making these paper catalogs that started out as just one sheet of paper and then became little stapled-together catalogs that had pictures of the T-shirts that I had and the posters and things. And I started mailing them out to everyone that I knew, physical mail. I would get a list of addresses, and I would send these things out to everyone. And they would all have a little form that you could cut out, where you would check a box “I want this poster or this shirt,” and you’d stick a $10 bill into an envelope and mail it to a PO box in Chicago that I had.

And that’s basically how Justseeds started. I would get an order every month, every couple of weeks: “Hey, I’d like this t-shirt, here’s 10 bucks. I’d like this poster, here’s five bucks.” And I would put them in the mail and send them out. Not only did people start ordering things, and that picked up, so that it went from being an order a month to an order a week to an order a day, but also people who were doing very similar work to what I was doing started contacting me and saying, “Hey, will you help me sell my stuff?” And Alec was one of those people. There were a number of other people that all became the central hub of Justseeds when we became a cooperative in 2006.

TFSR: Can you talk a little bit about what you attribute the longevity of the cooperative to? Are there any major cons or negative qualities to working in a cooperative?

A: I’m kind of drawing a blank. What has made the cooperative have some longevity? And I know that that is a real thing. Someone had called us the last legacy activist project of the early 2000s that was still going, which was embarrassing. Anyway, partly, we’re geographically dispersed, so that is a big disadvantage and also a little bit of an advantage in that some of the wear and tear of being around each other. I guess everything I would say I would see as both an advantage and disadvantage. So geographically dispersed, we’re not always up in each other’s shit, to put it bluntly. Cooperative or not, we do collective decision-making, and we’re still in an evolving process 20 years later on how to decide these bigger issues with the group.

But in general, we have a loose, for better or worse, set of values that we work around and do try and have a lot of trust with each other as far as cooperative projects. And not everyone having to be involved with everything all the time. Certainly, some tensions have arisen at various times. And we’re not strictly ideological. We cover probably a wide swath of left politics from liberal to revolutionary at times, and people express different political views. And that has also been something of an advantage. At various points, we have talked about trying to make points of unity between us, and in some ways, our longevity is that we haven’t had really strict ideological boundaries that we draw ourselves around.

TFSR: Pivoting a little bit to the topic at hand, PM Press just published issue number eight of Signal. It is a decade-plus project for you guys, is that correct?

A: Yeah, we are 12 years now.

J: We conceptualized it in 2008-2009, and then the first issue came out in 2010.

TFSR: Can you talk about the origins, the initial intentions, and maybe how your considerations and goals have changed over the course of its life?

A: Sure, both Josh and I have been fans of political art, especially from other countries. And especially when the time we’re starting out, it could be difficult to find. So we both had spent a good amount of time in libraries and looking at the foreign language section of used bookstores for art books and old Eastern Bloc catalogs, things like that. We both had accrued similar interests and knowledge. And a lot of stuff was fairly big, but the things we were interested in were fairly well-known, but there was not a lot published at the time and certainly not a lot in print. So I’m talking about things like the Taller de Gráfica Popular which was a Mexican print collective that started in the 1930s. Atelier Populaire which was the loose name for young print makers following the May 1960s uprisings in France. Russian constructivists, German expressionists, all that stuff. It’s almost canonical at this point, but at the time, you had to dig pretty deep to find stuff about Leopoldo Méndez or Elizabeth Catlett.

So, we both were big fans of that, as well as most of the printmakers we knew. And Josh and I just got a little bit nerdier about trying to draw connections and look for stuff. So we talked about wanting to do a publication. We both felt there was a lot to learn from previous graphical movements. There was so much richness there. In the scene that Justseeds came out of and that we’d come out of, it was a fairly barren environment, and we felt a little bit messianic or something about trying to infuse more art into that world. And also OSPAAAL the Cubans group had so much color and life, and it was such a different graphic language. And we were both very influenced by work that was being sent to Josh from a friend of ours in Japan of Japanese political graphic design, which just seems to have a totally different basis and format and structure. Just a very different aesthetic. And feeling like those things could help us in the US expand the idea of what we think is possible and enrich also our graphic palette. So that was the beginning. Josh should probably pitch in here as well.

What is interesting is originally we talked about trying to do stuff that was focused on international political art, with the idea of having a US-based audience. And over time, what we found is we actually have a fairly large international audience. I don’t know what it would be as a breakdown, probably, it’s still mostly US. But it feels like a lot of the interaction we get from people on email and feedback is mostly from international people.

TFSR:When you say what’s possible, are you talking in terms of design or from a political perspective?

A: Both, from design and also from the role of designer or artist or creative worker within a political movement. As Josh had noted, when Justseeds started, when he had started doing art in the late 90s-early 2000s, the role of the artist was very pushed to the side, like make a poster, and maybe the image you made would be shrunk down and thrown in the corner, or pixelated or whatever. And so seeing the prominent role and freedom and resources that people had in political movements the world over or that they created was inspiring and very different than how creative work was treated in political struggles in the US.

J: To paint a picture, so to speak, in the mid to late 90s, if you went to a demonstration in the United States, the most common thing that you would probably get handed would be an 8.5×11 sheet of paper that was filled on both sides with 10 point type. And maybe there’d be a corner of a child who had been bombed or something in a little image. Things were type-heavy. They were visually not particularly nuanced. And then if you were coming from a more anarchist or anti-authoritarian perspective, and you were a maker like Alec and I, people would get upset if you used anything other than red and black. There were really strong conventions around what was acceptable and readable as political in this way or that way. And neither of us was really interested in that. And we felt that it not just harmed to the visual culture, but it actually made politics not particularly attractive. And so we were really interested in trying to look at examples from history and around the world when other visual regimes existed.

TFSR: So the thing that strikes me from initially taking a look at Signal is how deeply considered everything is. From a design perspective, can you discuss some of the design choices you’ve made over the course of the publication and what informed them? A few things that struck me in the latest issue, for example, are your use of landscape images situated vertically, and that odd-numbered pages have block text, while even-numbered pages have the text in columns. What did you want Signal to be, and what did you not want it to be? You touched on this prior but maybe a little deeper into it.

J: From the get-go, Signal has always had this primary tension at its core, which is our desire to give space and voice to all of these different images and histories and narratives. And at the same time, work within the limits of what was possible with the publishing that we had access to. PM has been amazingly generous and has facilitated this project now for over a decade. But part of the ability for us to pitch and even get this project started was to say we’re going to have to do something relatively small. It’s 5×7. Each one is not a coffee table book. They’re pocket-sized because that’s what we could afford to do. That’s what PM had the capacity to print in full color. Limited page count. And so it’s always been this interesting tension. The design is really driven by a desire to push as much into each issue as possible. But at the same time, try to give each feature its own space, both so that it’s readable, but also so that the images are able to breathe, so people can take some time with them. And some of the things, like taking a horizontal image and turning it on its head so that it’s vertical, some of that is space. If you make it vertical, you can make it bigger, because the publication is vertical. But some of it is also just trying to upturn traditional conventions so that the eye has to turn a little bit to look at something a little differently to get people to engage in a way that is different than when you just pick up a standard trade paperback and go page by page.

TFSR: Do you approach each issue as a new concept, or are you trying to create continuity across iterations?

A: We have some continuity. We definitely have some formats that we import issue to issue. And some of that you noted with the columns versus two blocks of text and things like that. A lot of that is probably even a little bit unconscious. But there’s a way that I probably have in my head at this point developed how Signal looks. We use a similar font to read that we find to be very readable at a small size. So there is some design continuity. We do try and do a new design for each article and each issue, and as far as making a conscious choice of what’s going to be an issue and whether that balance is out there, that doesn’t happen at all. We might have an article that we hold back from an issue for space or for whatever reason, and you can place that in a later issue when you want to, but for the most part, we’re mostly dependent on contributors and on time and getting things in. And so each issue ends up a little bit accidental. And especially even when they had just one issue out, there was a good response to it. But people could say this is a hodgepodge of articles. And now with eight issues, and the 9^th coming and the 10^th coming after that, you started seeing them as a collection. And it creates an interesting tapestry or mosaic of ideas about what political art can be and how art is used in social movements and political struggles around the world.

So to answer your question, is there anything deliberate about it? Now, it’s pretty random, issue to issue, although Josh and I both have probably ideas about what fits in the magazine as a whole and what doesn’t. And those can be very broad ideas. One thing, which we’re more probably open to in the beginning but probably less interested in now, and that’s not across the board, we still have fine art in there, but we’re less interested in things that appear in galleries or are conceived as fine art or art projects that are political. We are more interested in applied arts, meaning things like design, illustration, printmaking, and sculpture that are meant to be used by activists or movements directly.

J: It’s also important to point out that maybe it’s changed a little bit over the past decade, but when we started, and it’s still largely true now, that this place that we’re locating our interests, which is the intersection of social movements and cultural production, is not one that there’s a lot of writing about. And in particular, the writing tends to fall either into the heavily academic realm in which you’ll have highly theoretical volume about a very specific time and place in which something like this happens. So the role of pirate radio in the Quebecois national struggle from 1972 to 1975, or something. Or when we were starting out, you’d have like zine articles. People who were interested in things and just did a teeny bit of research and wrote a little thing about something. And now the equivalent of that, I guess, is blog posts that exist about some of these things. And we were really interested in trying to find a space in between those, that we’re interested in writing that is accessible to a general audience, and particularly to the people that make this culture. But that’s serious, that isn’t just a toss-off paragraph to put with a handful of images, but actually is considered and takes into account the context in which material was made and the impacts it potentially had. And that sweet spot of writing is hard to find. And that’s part of why we tend to decide the table of contents as we’re putting an issue together because we’re not drawing on this massive well of 500 articles that have been submitted. We’re scrambling to try to get people to get us material and to find the things to cobble together an issue because there just has not been support for that populist but engaged writing around culture and politics, at least not in the United States.

TFSR: Can you speak to publications or design philosophies, whether they are mainstream or of the niche, activist variety that has influenced the way you are putting this together? It’s certainly its own distinctive thing, but you can also make the case that Signal is part of a lineage, so to speak.

A: Well, I would say, as far as where it exists on the landscape of current graphic design, it’s a journal, it’s not a book. So there are things that we carry over in each issue. And in that way, we are not like many other journals. A lot of journals have a very set design pattern. They use certain typography or the way that they box in images or don’t have images at all often. I was thinking that some weekly publications do some innovative stuff and graphic design. I don’t know. Josh, you should go for it.

J: I was thinking maybe just to tell a story. When I was 19, I went into a bookshop in Washington, DC, a used bookshop, and buried in a pile of old books, I found this copy of the Cienfuegos Press anarchist review, the fourth issue, I think. Cienfuegos Press was this British anarchist publishing house that existed in the 1970s and into the early 1980s. They did this anarchist review, which at its peak, 3^rd-5^th issues, was this oversized, maybe 9×12 inch dense, packed 200-250 page compendium catalog of all things anti-authoritarian. And I’ve carried that book with me the rest of my life, and part of it is that it’s just chock full of so many little things that you can pick it up. It’s one of those things, you can pick up 10 different times and open it and you’ll find 10 different things.

But one of the probably most impactful parts about it is that it was designed and illustrated by this British anarchist artist named Clifford Harper. Clifford Harper was a big influence both on me and on Alec, in different ways. He put out a very influential publication called Anarchy: A Graphic Guide, which was almost a clip art book of anarchist history that hundreds and hundreds of people have taken images out of and repurposed and reused on flyers and books and record covers and T-shirts and things like that. And he was really an influential point of entry into how one could be an engaged artist and designer and do what you want, but also work within the context of social movements and publishing houses in other forms. He did illustrations for the Guardian for years. So he weaved in and out of both the ultra-left and the mainstream. And there are a number of people like that that we have been influenced by: David King, another British designer that maybe Alec will talk about Dea Trier Mørch, an illustrator and designer from Copenhagen, and people like that.

A: Yeah, and because we are a publication that’s focused on art and design, art and design are important for us to have look good and match the context of our stories. Josh did mention David King who was an English graphic designer who died a couple of years ago and whose work was ubiquitous in ways that once you figured out who he was, you started understanding that there was more and more of your life that things that you’d like because how they looked, and there were a lot of them are designed by David King. He was a just great, excellent graphic designer. He was probably most well known for doing the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland a bunch of classic rock album covers, and then in the 70s and 80s, did a lot of the graphic design, not the logo itself, but for Rock Against Racism, a lot of anti-apartheid graphics, and had a very Soviet-influenced bold, colorful, big Sans Serif type, just beautiful, vibrant work. He was a historian, did book covers for Penguin, did tons of graphic design, and did a lot of political work. So that was definitely a big influence on us as well.

J: The underground press like the work of Emory Douglas in the Black Panther Paper, the graphics that came out of the AIDS movement in the 80s and 90s. All these things were influences. And all of them in different ways touched on publishing, whether or not it was in the form of an ongoing publication, like the Black Panther newspaper, or in the form of serialized broadsheets or flyers like that came out of the Act Up and AIDS movement. Print and publishing have always been central to the forms of aesthetics that we’re drawn to.

TFSR: Most if not all of the stuff covered in Signal is grounded in the physical rather than the digital realm. What do you see as the special value of physical media in the digital age?

J: You can touch it. This question around digital verse or parallel to analog can go in so many different directions. To keep it contained, we’re the last pre-born digital generation. So both of us were born in a time before there was the expectation that we would be seeing things on a screen.

To be honest, I just have a nostalgia/natural orientation towards physical print because it’s what I grew up with. It’s what I learned to read with. It’s how I learned to make things. But beyond that, the reality is that we can take a piece of paper and we can put an image and some text on it and we can throw it onto a copy machine or a risograph or even an inkjet printer and we have almost total control over what that is, what’s on it, how it gets distributed, who sees it. And then the reality with the internet is that there’s the illusion of a certain digital democracy. But the fact of the matter is that 99% of internet and even social media traffic goes through a very, very, very small handful of websites that we don’t own or control.

So you maybe are lucky if what you make gets seen because of some algorithmic glitch or some gatekeeper lets it through. But the reality is that we just don’t own the digital means of reproducing our ideas, but we do have the ability to own the analog means. Maybe it’s an old-school left argument about controlling the means of production. But the physical means of production are much more accessible and easier to own and have some control over and management of.

A: I would just dovetail on there too. There’s definitely room for people who want to do this digitally. Both Josh and I like print media. But whether or not that has to be the way it has to be, for us, it’s a way that we can have longer form ideas. Images have a more impactful space that you engage with more as opposed to just flicking past. For other people, that might not be true. And there are certainly a lot of people out there… there’s many Instagram accounts that I follow that are doing archives of left covers of books and posters and things like that. Lots of stuff like that is out there. And I don’t think us being in this lane and us moving in that lane… it’s synergistic, I hope. And I don’t feel like we have to crossover at this point, either, which is maybe at some point, it would feel like you had to, but there’s plenty of people in the digital space doing archiving and documenting.

For us, it gives us a chance to really highlight and focus in on some works and some ideas and give it some space. And at least in my particular reading habits, people of our generation, people that I know, which are not all of my generation, it allows a further sense of space and focus on that work. I know people who just read things on their phones, and I just couldn’t do it. I just don’t… It’s too distracting. It’s too small. That might not be the case for others. Is that too open-minded, Josh? What do you think?

J: No, no, that’s good. I’m not against the digital, I just think that there needs to be a little bit more of an open-eyed reality check about what it is and what it isn’t. The vast majority of the Internet is a giant graveyard of websites that no one goes to and aren’t kept up because there’s this promise it’s really easy to make a website. In reality, it’s actually quite difficult to maintain one. And it’s expensive. And publishing in physical form is actually cheaper and it lasts longer.

TFSR: So to bring our discussion to a close. What do you see as the role of propaganda in movement-making? What are the qualities that you think that make it effective? And what do you see as its greatest potential and greatest limitations?

A: One thing that we knew going in, I don’t think this is new to us, but it’s something we learn continually is that there is no set formula for what makes good propaganda in political movements. It’s very unique to the situation with the artists, to the movement itself, and just to the spirit behind it. So, there’s not necessarily a slam dunk there. But I do think – maybe this is the slam dunk – is that what makes effective propaganda in movements is when people are involved with a movement or have some basis in that movement. Doesn’t have to be necessarily with an organization, but a long time coming in that movement.

I remember there was a long time ago before Signal existed, Josh and I lived together in Chicago and there was a new group doing a presentation on a wheat pasting campaign, and the idea at the time was that people there can go and learn how to do this and go out and do it right away. And the reality is that – I don’t remember what this it was about, prison or something – but Josh had spent a number of years involved in prison abolition movements, had made art with people, and had developed relations with people and got a crew out to go out and do this action. Rarely is it something you can just do on the spot and have be effective. There’s so much work in the background of doing effective cultural work. And some of that work is just spending time in the movement and in the community. So it’s not necessarily about being in a specific organization. To me, that is oftentimes what we cover are people who have been thoughtful about their work and their communities and the movements that matter to them and take some creative approaches to going about it and pivoting when things aren’t working, having happy accidents when things do.

J: Yeah, the propaganda or agitprop overlap with fine art traditions and design, commercial design, but they’re not the same thing. They have their own concerns and their own needs. And some of those are relatively universal, and some of those are movements-specific. And that part of what I hope that Signal can do is it can help illuminate that this is a unique tradition. And that while it’s not completely separate from the things that we call art or the things that we call design, to think about it as its own territory really helps from the perspective of makers and of movements to make better agitprop, to realize that there are things really useful, that making material that people are familiar with, so it’s easy for them to pick it up and take some ownership over it, is often more powerful than something that’s like brand new, which is like very different than if you’re doing commercial design work and you want to make you’re trying to sell a new product, or you’re doing fine art and it’s all about newness. That, in fact, newness is not necessarily the best thing when you’re doing agitprop. Doing things that are collectively produced is often quite difficult when you’re working in the terrain of fine art or commercial design.

But within movements, it tends to help generate senses of collective authorship and ownership. And those multiple voices adding in can really speak to the different elements and aspects of people who are part of an organization or a movement or a group that’s trying to do something. And so there’s just different concerns. By putting to the foreground lots of different examples and the ways that people have negotiated and engaged with these questions, we just hope that that will be helpful and useful for people that are continuing to do that into the future.

TFSR: Okay, I think that I have what I need. Thank you again for taking the time to do this again. I really appreciate it.

J: No worries.

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Mwalimu Shakur Transcription

TFSR:Yeah, so we’ve spoken before, but I wonder if you wouldn’t mind reminding listeners of your name, your location, and any information about you that would set the stage for this chat?

Mwalimu Shakur: Well, my name is Mwalimu Shakur. And I’m in the belly of the beast, known as Corcoran State Prison, home of the first secure housing unit, SHU. And being back in the general population, having to rebuild and restructure, things going on in this camp has not been easy. But it’s a challenge welcome. Being the freedom fighter that I am, and understanding what needs to be done, me and other comrades of like mind, we welcome it. So that’s what I’m doing until they unleash these gates and allow me to walk out of here and reenter society where I can help with the movement that is going on out there.

TFSR: The last time we spoke, you talked about how a lot of the work that you’re doing in there is study and discussion and sharpening those tools. And I know, over the last two years, there’s been a lot of chatter at various levels, even in mainstream society, around the concept of abolition. And people have been talking about abolitionism for a very long time with different definitions of what that movement is and what that phrase means. I wonder if you could bust into what the term abolition means to you.

MS: Well, for me and others like me on the inside, abolition means destroying this system from the inside out, as well as an outside in, which you have to wake up the minds of those in society, so they can understand how to do that, or they’ll fall into the gap of reform. They’ll try to make the system better by coming up with laws to change it and wanting to follow certain rules in order to get those laws to change. And you can’t do that, you have to tear the system down and rebuild another one that works for the people. Because when people are oppressed, they’re not just oppressed by one front, like an economic front.

In this system, they oppress us on all fronts: political fronts, they use their military apparatus to keep us in control, they oppress us with this prison system, where it teaches you have to be a slave to it because your labor they exploit in here economically and politically, just like they’re doing in society. You have to understand that. And that’s the importance of us providing these reeducation classes, which teaches you how to abolish the system by challenging the conditions and having a new system in place once you do that. So that’s the bulk of what we do on a daily basis. Because if you teach the people how to understand what’s going on, they can come up with their own unique strategies and tactics to reach that objective. So it’s a challenge in and of itself. But yeah, that’s what abolition means to me. And that’s one of the ways in which we can accomplish that, through our reeducation.

TFSR: I wonder if you can say some words about the historical context of… As a new Afrikan revolutionary, if you could speak about the context of abolition and the legacy of abolition and where the movement, using that phrase now, stands in terms of that, the continuation from abolition of slavery through the abolition of Jim Crow, or any of these systems that have popped up.

As Michelle Alexander talked about in her book, that one thing after another, an oppressive system comes up, a change occurs that causes a shift that makes it impossible for it to function in the same way that it had before, and there being the resumption of those oppressions under a new name and under a slightly different framework. Is that the reform that you’re talking about?

MS: Yes. And you see it clearly. Because like you just made mention of, from slavery, they went from to Jim Crow. From Jim Crow, they went to the system you see now, the prison industrial slave complex. They practice the same things within the systems, but they change things around so that people will be led to believe that they’ve given you the change that you’ve desired. And as you noted, no, that’s not the case. Because when you let the clauses in the amendments, the 13^th and 14^th amendments, you could continue to utilize these same practices. It’s smoke and mirrors. By changing the name, you also change the face of it. And nothing has changed. But people sometimes believe that it has, so they have hope. And they go along with certain things, while other things on the other side are getting worse. Take for example, when you so-called freed the slaves. Well, if that was true, then why were slavery practices still being done in Texas and then a couple years later, people recognize they’re now free. You kept the same system in place, you just changed the names of certain things. You let slaves free in the South, but if you caught them with no place to go, then you put them into jail with a make-believe court system. You establish the police department, which justifies your way of doing that. And you call it the convict lease program, which puts them back into the plantation on whoever owns it, to practice the same thing legally.

You see what I’m saying? There was no change in the system. So getting people to understand that is the hard part because people will become complacent. The 1% class that oppresses us throws other things out there to distract you so that you don’t see what they’re doing behind closed doors. How they got people distracted now with this materialism. They got you thinking that if you do the thing that they want you to do, like go into the avenues of entertainment games or sports, that you will be successful, when in actuality all you’re doing is giving the money right back to them by buying their houses, buying the cars, buying the clothes. You don’t see that they’re still oppressing you and they’re still controlling you, by way of the system. So that’s the whole concept of getting people to see that nothing’s changed.

TFSR: So in the last couple of years within the framework of discussing abolition versus reform, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about non-reformist reforms, as in things that can be done through the legal system to mitigate the harm that people are suffering in the immediate in hopes that releasing that chokehold will allow people the space and capacity to be able to resist further.

As one of the organizers and resistors from the widespread hunger strikes a little over a decade ago in the California system, following that people challenged through courts, and some of that’s still going through the courts, but some of the circumstances that kept people in solitary confinement for such long times without the ability to challenge that, in your mind, is there a thing such as a non-reformist reform? Or does it all get fed back into the system? And if you wouldn’t mind talking a little bit about that experience of the direct action, hunger strikes that you all were taking, and court battles afterward, and how those relate.

MS: Well, because the struggle continues, it’s not over, you do have to find little ways within the system to work. And there’s strategies and techniques that you use to reach an objective, but you use it, and you don’t stop, you got to keep going. So we found ways within a system to cause a stir by the hunger strike, but we knew we weren’t gonna settle for that. We’re going to also attack the courts. We were also going to mobilize people in society to form organizations around these same needs to challenge these conditions that we’re facing. And waking them up to see what’s really going on by educating them, they’ve seen it.

So you do find those ways to make things happen. But you can’t settle for that. And that’s where people go wrong because they believe… If they look at reform as a good thing, they’ll settle for doing things that way. And then when the enemy comes with a counterattack, they won’t be prepared to fend that off. Because they’ll start thinking about abolition, and only focus on that reform that you were talking about. So what we are continuing to do is practice what Ho Chi Minh talked about, win the war of the flea. When he goes against the enemies, it’s like a flea attacking a tiger. It bites him in all different places and worries him, so the tiger can’t recover, and it has to run in the forest to try to find some type of a tree to rub against, or some type of relief by jumping in the water or something, to stop the fleas from attacking them. Well, that’s what the people have to do to the system in order to get complete abolition. You have to attack all the fronts: economic, political, the justice system, coming together culturally, socially. And by doing this, you’re able to get more relief in those areas you didn’t think you could get relief in, and it caused you to not settle and not be complacent.

So the hunger strike, the momentum that it gained, we just went with that, and it allowed some people to get their freedoms back into society where they can do some work in the community, create self-sufficiency programs, join some of those organizations, and work in the legal field, or in other cultural ways, create businesses that help people, get into the public school system and push the literature in there that we was reading a study that helps you overcome the certain types of things. And just continue to rebuild and use that momentum to cause you to keep fighting and keep going. So that you don’t become complacent. So you do use those avenues, and they work to a certain extent, but you got to keep going because you can’t get abolition if you don’t. And that’s the main objective.

TFSR: So in terms of abolition, understanding that people harm each other and that people have safety concerns, some people are a bit frightened by the concept of abolition or think it’s naive to think of a world without police, maybe because they think of police as serving the purpose of keeping communities safe. But I wonder if you had thoughts about how we imagine and develop an abolitionist approach to community safety, minus cops and prisons, and without just reproducing the same methods and institutions under a different name, that would have the same result.

MS: Well, first of all, the people would have to realize that creating your own organizations, they’re self-governing, and they have rules that people have to subordinate themselves to. And within doing so, you develop the discipline that you need in order to carry out the organization’s work, which could be self-sufficiency programs, and other types of talents that you bring out of people so that they’ll feel more appreciative and forthcoming to what’s going on in a new society. And there won’t be a crime or malicious intent from people because you’re holding them accountable for those rules and those regulations. So in a way, you are policing yourselves because you can also create a people’s police department that holds people accountable for breaking any type of those rules, and then you hand out disciplinary punishments for that type of thing.

If people had more programs, you’d have help for whatever type of chemical imbalances they may have. You will provide the right types of medication. And you wouldn’t have crime. Crime is usually produced by people who are considered the underclass because the rich holds all the power. And even if you watch TV shows, like the cartoon Robin Hood, you see that the rich get all the power, and the poor people were stealing from the rich in order to have basic necessities. So when you have those things that happen, then you have to recreate things in order to have a complete society.

TFSR: This is the line of thought that we’re moving on, both of us, but whether you’re at Corcoran or in North Carolina, or wherever, the systems of power that exist that use the language of justice and safety, while they’re getting their paychecks and while they’re driving around our communities, there is a degree to which a lot of people in our communities invest trust in those words, or say, “It’s like the best that we’ve got.” I wonder if there are any examples you can talk about where you’ve seen people shift the ground and choose the rules that they follow, communicate about that directly, and take the power to some degree out of the hands of the so-called authorities and build community power.

MS: Well, yeah, we’re doing that now. When people come together, like us New Afrikans, we study our history, and practice our culture. Mexicans are doing the same thing. And when you have the whites who believe in this Aryan way of living, they’re not portraying their hate on us, and they’re not disrespecting us verbally, they’re practicing their way of life. And some of them are Odinists and go to those types of services where they’re worshipping, I guess, Satan or some type of being other than the God of all creation. And that’s their way of life, that’s their thing. People stay in their own little groups. If there is any type of form of disrespect, no matter how it is, we’re going to try to neutralize that situation before it gets out of hand, before it goes to all out violence.

So we do that amongst ourselves. Now, let’s say we’re all being mistreated and disrespected by staff. We’re all going to come together, like we did in our hunger strike, and said we’re not eating. And if they try to pop the doors like they did it, and people are gonna attack each other, we stand on it, linked up. We’re not going to be violent. So that was a way of taking the power out of their hands. And not letting them interfere in our business allows us to take the power back from them, creating our own, as I said, communities on the inside. We got our own economic system, which is socialism. So that way, if you give a brother a disciplinary write-up for not locking it up on time, or you want to ransack a cell and not put it back in a respectful manner in which you left, and he filed a 602 on you for that, and you want to try to retaliate by always searching his cell. You got to stop that because before he gets violent and attacks you, we’re going to come together and have a sit-down and we’re not going to lock it up until the sergeant comes over here. We’re going to address that issue, and then we’re going to put another 602 on that officer, get him removed from the building for that type of disrespect.

Anytime you take from us something that we hold dear, which like our little bit program that we get, we’re going to retaliate in a meaningful way, not in a violent way, but in a meaningful way, where we can talk about it in dialogue and have a discussion about what’s going on because now you’re hindering an infringement on our time when you get to go home. We don’t. For some of us, this is our home for a long period. So we know how to neutralize situations and come together. And that takes the power out of their hand because if they can’t move you and cause you to violence so they can retaliate in a more violent way, which causes them to place you in solitary confinement, give you new charges, and things of that nature, then they lose the battle.

TFSR: Yeah. You and I had spoken about this book, Chronicles of A Prison Dirty War. It goes through the experiences of a black political revolutionary prisoner. I don’t know if the author identifies as a new Afrikan. Does he? Should I correct that?

MS: Yeah, he’s a New Afrikan freedom fighter, he’s an elder.

TFSR: Okay. But talking about both the bolstering of white gangs and the further racialization of those white gangs inside of the California prison system coming up through the 60s and 70s, and then the vying through the creation of the prison economy by administration and by the guards of different sets and different communities against each other within the California system, and it feels like the hunger strike that you participated in falls into this long line of instances where what was called by the folks during the Lucasville uprising as “the prison class,” the unification of a common understanding of a shared situation, that even though some groups had an immediate leg up over the other groups, everyone was still locked into the same cages at the end of the day.

And one of the strengths of those hunger strikes that you participated in were that it was people from so many different communities as well as different sets, if they engaged in that, unifying basically against the common circumstances that they were experiencing in a way that spread like wildfire, and the state of California could not deal with it. It’s spread outside of the state. It spread up the coast, and it spread to places in Canada. But I wonder if you could speak about the potential of that thing both inside or outside of the prison system.

MS: Well, that’s what we need. Once you recognize you have a common enemy, everybody can come together in solidarity and challenge their conditions. That was just the way we chose to do so. Hunger strike, and then put out a mandate saying we agreed to end all our hostilities because he know what started all hostilities, like what the elder spoke of in the book. In those days it was a racial time in society, COINTELPRO was in full effect, and the FBI was attacking revolutionaries in our class struggle, all social classes. And on the inside, you have the white supremacist ideology groups, where they also put those types of COs in the prison. They weren’t hiring Blacks and Mexican prison guards, so you have the white supremacist ideology prison guards in here. So now, when you put blacks in here, which was second to the white, and they became a majority, were faced with all types of racial oppression. As [the author of Chronicles of Prison Dirty War], clearly, was talking about.

They had to come together in unity to challenge that. What was intriguing is that a lot of people didn’t know that the FBI created these institutional structures as well that are government agencies: the SSU and the IGI and the ISU. Those are federal agencies that work inside the prison, and they only target the social classes of inmates. Once you go to war, there’s no time to stop and ask questions about why, what happened. It’s just awful about war. And in order to curb that war, they were putting everybody in solitary confinement, killing the head thinking that the body would die. So that way the wars continued to happen in the general population. And after so long of that they create the SHU and start putting people, buried alive in there for generations on generations. And when you understand the conditions, you have to let others know: “Look, this is what we face. This is why we face it. Here’s the solution. What do you have?” And then somebody’ll pitched their solution, and somebody’ll pitch their solution, and then here com a strategy. The next thing you know here goes some other tactic you can use to complement their strategy. And it works when you keep the objective at the core part of your mind because we cannot stop until we achieve this. And that’s what made it so enjoyable.

We was able to see a way out, and we was able to make them understand why it was important for us to achieve this. And we kept doing what we needed to do to get there. I wasn’t one of the leaders in that movement, I just followed suit. I can’t take the credit for none of that. But my elders, they’re very sharp and talented individuals. They have strong minds. And I thank them for instilling such strong disciplinary principles inside myself. Because without them, I don’t know where I would be. My education came from them. Them long hours of studying and reading and continuing to read and study and writing essays about what I learned and how to show it in my practice, and going through ideological struggle so that I can transform my mind and become the new man that I am. It’s only because my elders had the foresight to see what kind of beauty we could have at the end if we continue with this fight.

TFSR: That’s really beautiful to point to the elders. And you continue that legacy by bringing in younger folks and sharing the knowledge and the experiences that you have, which is great.

I was wondering, there’s some pretty good news about your release getting closer. Can you tell the audience a bit about when you’re due out and what your plans are for when you get out?

MS: Well, I am due out, according to this Prop 57, which is a board that they have in absentia to you. But it acts just like the regular parole board for those who have a life sentence for them to be considered released back into society. And for us who have a non-violent sentence, it allows us to go to the board before our actual release date to get out early. And in my case, they waited till the last minute. My release date is in December, a month before my parole board hearing, which is in November. So even though it’s only 30 days, I would still like it to pass. And I’m thankful for it if it does. If not, I’m still thankful that I’ll be getting out here soon.

Within the next few months, my plans are to reenter society and get into the workforce. I am a paralegal by trade, and as well as I am practicing journalism. Finding work is not going to be too hard for me. I have other fields that I can utilize. And I know a few people who can help me navigate through the job market and whatnot. But I’m planning on working with community organizations and bringing transformative programs to the inner city communities. Of course, I’ll be in Los Angeles, my hometown, for at least a year till I get off parole. And I’m hoping that once I do, I’ll be able to travel to other states, to these other cities, and see what problems exist and try to help those who are doing something about fixing those problems, working with them in solidarity.

TFSR: That’s awesome. You mentioned that you’re a journalist, and I’m sure as a paralegal and with your experience, I’m sure you’ll be able to find a lot of opportunities. You have been publishing writing recently with a Los Angeles-based online publication. Can you talk about that? Maybe name where people can find your writing.

MS: Oh, yeah. Knock LA. I got some comrades over there, my boy Chris, my boy Joey. I’ve been working with them. I think the first time I told somebody I was paroling was Kite Line, my friend Mia over there. Working with them has been a pleasure. People want to know about how we made it in the SHU for so long, how the transition has been since we’ve gotten out the SHU. So that was the last piece of work that I did.

TFSR: How can people follow your writing on social media? Some folks are running pages for you, right?

MS: Yeah, I have Instagram. It’s at @newafrikanrevolutionary. You can find me there, you can find me at Revolutionary Internationalism. And my fiance has a Facebook page, Freedom Looks Good On Us. She’s also a brilliant person. She’s a strong woman. She’s been rebuilding her life since she’s been out of prison. She works for CCWP, California Coalition for Women Prisoners. And Lisa is remarkable with the work that she does. And we’ll be collaborating on projects once I get free as well.

TFSR: That’s awesome. I look forward to learning more about her and finding some of her work out there. Thank you so much for having this conversation and for your efforts. And I’m excited for your release.

MS: I really appreciate all the help. You’ve been there for me Bursts. And the work that you do and the work that I look forward to doing with you when I get out there. Can’t wait to get out into society and continue this good work. It’s always a pleasure.

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