Reading this passage of Mumia's I think I see the anti-working class rhetoric of 'white skin privilege'
>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
America's industrial working class is the biggest in the world, but, perhaps understandably given his present situation, what Mumia sees is cops, prison officers and security guards. This is sympathetically expressed but it is supposed to mean that the workers are part of the 'fortress economy' i.e. complicit in oppression.
The free Mumia campaign makes its case on the basis of the likelihood of a frame-up, given Mumia's political past. That I can support, but I don't feel any need to support his views.
In message <v03130300b4c69ecf0fa5@[140.254.112.116]>, Yoshie Furuhashi
<furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes
> For instance, Mumia says in one
>interview:
>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out of date in America, in that the USA has just about given up on the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
>
>
-- Jim heartfield