>[The Mumia stuff starts about 2/3 of the way down.]
>
>The Progressive - October 1995
>
>Martyrs and false populists.
>(Class Notes)(Column)
>Adolph Reed Jr.
Reed's article doesn't have much to say about Mumia or the Free Mumia movement. It says much, however, about Reed's view of the state. After criticizing the romantic view of militias, Reed elaborates:
>I confess, as well, to being toward the statist end of the left, at
>least among those of us whose politics were formed in the 1960s and
>after. I'm always uneasy when we get fuzzy about the distinction
>between our objections to actions taken by those who control the
>American state and a more general objection to the State as an
>abstraction. Yes, government is ultimately a means of coercion.
>Therefore, it needs to be accountable to the citizenry. At the same
>time, government needs to be insulated from the whims of fleeting,
>potentially tyrannical majorities.
>
>The experience of being black in the United States highlights the
>dangers of a simplistically majoritarian notion of democracy.
>Decentralization of public authority in the name of popular
>democracy--from "states' rights" to the "new (and newer)
>federalism"--has been a rallying cry of opponents of black civil
>rights for more than a century and a half.
>
>The state is the only vehicle that can protect ordinary citizens
>against the machinations of concentrated private power. Even though
>it does function as an executive committee of the ruling class, the
>national state is the guarantor of whatever victories working people,
>minorities, gays, women, the elderly, and other constituencies we
>embrace have been able to win--often enough against the state itself.
>And this applies both to formalizing those victories as rights and
>using public policy to redistribute resources that make them
>practical reality.
>
>The public sector is the area of the economy most responsive to
>equal-opportunity employment. And the national state--ours as well as
>others--is the only entity powerful enough to control the activities
>of piratical multinational corporations. That's what the fights
>against NAFTA and GATT are all about--preserving the state's capacity
>to enforce social, economic, and environmental standards within its
>own territory.
>
>And that's just the defensive side of the struggle. We need to press
>for a more active use of the state in international economic and
>foreign policy to combat the multinationals' depredations across the
>globe.
>
>It always seemed to me that our struggle, to rehearse a long-outdated
>slogan, wasn't really to smash the state, but to seize it and direct
>it to democratic and egalitarian purposes.
Wonder what anarchist & autonomist contingents of LBO-talkers think of Reed's comments on the state. Moreover, his view of the state and his perspective on militias, Mumia, etc. are not unrelated, it seems. While I agree with Reed on militias, I think he contradicts himself on his assessment of the Mumia case:
>This is true of organizations as well as individuals. Members of the
>MOVE cult in Philadelphia certainly should not have been bombed by
>the city, but it was reasonable to evict them after years of their
>neighbors' complaints of harassment and public-health violations.
<snip>
>All that most of us
>know about his politics, apart from his speaking out against police
>brutality, is that he has some connection to MOVE--a group with
>pretty wacky ideas. Certainly he is an activist, but there are a lot
>of activists, some of whom have bad politics. Being victimized by the
>state should not in itself confer political stature.
<snip>
>Even under the best of conditions a movement built around a single
>individual can go only so far. This approach trades on the imagery of
>martyrdom; yet its goal is to ensure that the putative martyrs are
>rescued. Rescued martyrs, however, are always a potential problem
>because they live on as fallible human beings.
On one hand, Reed (perhaps rightly) cautions youths not to create a heroic image of a political martyr out of Mumia since, as he notes, "a movement built around a single individual can go only so far." On the other hand, he discusses MOVE & Mumia _as if_ the quality of their politics determined how leftists should regard their cases. I disagree. The issues in question are not whether MOVE & Mumia have correct political positions; the issues we care about are the ones that Nathan enumerated in his post titled "Mumia and Death Penalty Advoacy." _If_ Mumia isn't a left-wing hero (as Reed argues that he isn't & shouldn't be made out to be such), what does it matter whether his politics is "good" or "bad"? Questioning Mumia's political views undermines Reed's own argument that we should not focus on a single individual. Despite his own argument, _if_ Reed feels that he needs to discuss Mumia's politics to demystify the romantic aura of radicalism to which youths may be attracted, he must then discuss Mumia's own words and subject them to critical examination, _which he fails to do_. Mumia is a writer -- it should not be difficult for Reed to find out what Mumia's political views are. It seems disingenuous for Reed to say that "All that most of us know about his politics, apart from his speaking out against police brutality, is that he has some connection to MOVE--a group with pretty wacky ideas." Reed could have easily found out Mumia's politics from his writings and interviews. For instance, Mumia says in one interview:
***** When I talked about NAFTA and the free-trade agreement, what I was referring to is that no matter whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in power, big business is going to run them like a puppet-master. They are now dancing to the tune not of the people, not of the millions of people who are out of work, but to big business interests. There are an estimated 3 million people in the U.S. who literally do not have a home to live in; they are not listening to those wails and cries and lamentations; what they are listening to is the heartbeat of Wall Street, because that is what runs political campaigns in America today. Unless and until a political gathering and grouping is able to galvanize the power of the masses of the people, then no immediate change is imminent -- that is, positive change. There is going to be a whole lot of negative change to come. One of those changes is what we talked about earlier: Marionization. We are not just talking about the Marionization of this prison here in Huntington or in Pennsylvania prisons, but the Marionization and the "prisonization" of America....What you are looking at in the U.S. when I say prisonization is not just the million people who are locked down, but increasingly, as industries flee this country, people find that their only option in terms of personal survival is to become a part of what has been called a "fortress economy." Increasingly, when people look for jobs, they are finding jobs in the security field, that is as prison guards, as cops, etc. So from both the outside and the inside America is becoming the prison-house of nations. (_Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the U.S. War against Black Revolutionaries_, eds. Jim Fletcher, Tanaquil Jones, & Sylvere Lotringer, NY: Semiotext(e), 1993: 166-67) *****
Well, Mumia may not be the second coming of Karl Marx, but he sure sounds smarter & more left-wing than, say, post-secular philosophers whom some LBO-talkers worship, as far as I can see. His comments on "prisonization" are more astute than Foucault's in _Discipline & Punish_ (which looks a bit out of date in America, in that the USA has just about given up on the strategies of discipline based upon Benthamite reformism & secular reformation of the soul, in its fundamentalist zeal for the war on crime).
Yoshie