OTOH, prisoners running their own prison was a metaphor Marx might have used for capitalism. What was the famous one someone, Jim F?, once quoted here about the difference between slavery and capitalism, where a slavery must be whipped to work, under capitalism, a work does his own self-whipping.
At 09:27 PM 2/26/2012, Carrol Cox wrote:
>Did anyone read the fascinating material in this post by Chris Sturr?
>
>I had never heard of Walpole, but Chris's remarks on it seem to make it a
>really vital bit of history for any serious leftist.
>
>Carrol
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
>On Behalf Of Chris Sturr
>Sent: Sunday, February 26, 2012 1:18 PM
>To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] MH & DG on university
>
>A report from the field about the idea of free, non-credit-bearing higher
>ed and/or political education (this is partly a follow up to what Nathan
>said about OWS's efforts/plans): Some of us involved with Occupy Boston's
>"Free School University" have organized the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture
>Series here, which has had a great roster of speakers--including Bruno
>Bosteels, Victor Wallis, Fred Magdoff, Noam Chomsky, Rick Wolff, Avi
>Chomsky, Noel Ignatiev, Elaine Bernard, Vijay Prashad, Manny Ness, Roxanne
>Dunbar-Ortiz--and this is in addition to the series of teach-ins I
>organized by Boston-area left economists, including Juliet Schor, Arjun
>Jayadev, John Miller and Arthur MacEwan from D&S, and many others (videos
>of most of the HZMLS talks/teach-ins are online, here:
>http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5CC33755D87209BF).
>
>The HZMLS folks decided in December that this spring and summer we want to
>move beyond ad hoc teach-ins and talks by left academics and try to have a
>broader selection of political education offerings, including a
>full-fledged summer school. But we think it's crucial to find out what
>people--the broad constituencies Occupy needs to be reaching out to--would
>want if they could have courses in anything--what topics/subjects, and what
>teaching/learning methods. Not everyone wants a Gramsci reading group (as
>cool as that would be); some people might want math literacy, or how to
>deal with your boss (as someone pointed out earlier in this thread), or
>bicycle repair, or who knows what.
>
>So, both to make sure we keep active over the winter and also as way of
>publicizing our intent on having broad course offerings in the spring and
>summer *and* gathering information on what kinds of topics and methods
>people want, we have started a film/discussion series called "OccupyFilm,"
>with the first theme being "Occupied Peoples | People's Occupations." We
>figure films are pretty accessible, and facilitated discussion of
>precedents for the Occupy movement will be a start at political education.
>Our first film was "Left on Pearl," about the 1973 takeover of 888 Memorial
>Drive in Cambridge by feminists to create a women's center. The second
>film was the astounding "3,000 Years and Life," about the 1973 prisoner
>takeover of Walpole Prison (the prisoners' union took charge of running the
>prison for *three months* when the guards went on strike to protest a
>black, progressive Commissioner of Corrections, appointed, incidentally, by
>a Republican governor). For both events we had 50-60 people, most of whom,
>I would say, had had no exposure to Occupy before. For both events there
>were participants in the original "occupations" present to answer questions
>and provide context. Here's a link to the flyers about both events:
>http://zinnlectures.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/occupy-film-series-to-start/.
>(I designed the flyers. :) )
>
>The Walpole story, btw, gives an interesting twist on the discussion in
>this same thread of whether free public higher ed under capitalism is like
>having a prison library. The prisoners at Walpole, led by their *union*
>(how shocked would most people be to hear that there was a state-wide
>prisoners' union that negotiated with the prison administrators over living
>and working conditions?) reformed how the prison school was run, so that it
>better met prisoners' needs; they took over the prison kitchen and ran it
>without bosses, cooperatively; violence in the prison declined to almost
>nothing, and there was cooperation between white, black, and Latino
>prisoners; they brought in hundreds of outside observers to show what they
>had been able to do, and to dispel lies that the authorities (who were
>hoping the prisoners would riot to justify crushing the rebellion) were
>trying to spread. How this relates to the earlier mention of prison in
>this thread: prison and prison libraries are not just metaphors. A radical
>prison movement in the early 1970s, when there were 1/10th the number of
>prisoners there are today and 1/8th the rate of incarceration, involved
>solidarity between highly organized and politicized prisoners and outside
>activists, and pushed the idea that 9/10th of the people in prison didn't
>belong there, and when they were in prison they were capable of conducting
>their own affairs with dignity and without the need for guards or bosses.
>The rebellion at Walpole was a demonstration project for this point of
>view, and as such it had to be crushed, as it was, and then its history had
>to be buried, as it was. For more information about this episode, check
>out Jamie Bissonette's book *When the Prisoners Ran Walpole* (South End
>Press). (Jamie was also at our screening, in addition to Bobby Dellelo, who
>spent 50 years in Walpole and was the president of the prisoners' union at
>the time of the rebellion.)
>
>Any suggestions for more films for our series would be greatly
>appreciated. I would like to show films that aren't well known or screened
>that often, so although something like *The Take*, about the factory
>takeovers in Argentina, would fit in great, that one has been shown so much
>that we'd rather find other films that people haven't had access to.
>
>--
>--
>Chris Sturr
>Editor, *Dollars & Sense*
>29 Winter St.
>Boston, Mass. 02108
>phone: 617-447-2177, ext. 205
>fax: 617-447-2179
>email: sturr at dollarsandsense.org
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