TEXAS, October 9—The national prison strike is heading into its second month, prompting the Department of Injustice to make a show of an investigation in Alabama prisons.
To celebrate the 45th anniversary of the biggest prison rebellion in U.S. history at Attica, New York, thousands of worker-prisoners in 40 jailhouses covering 24 states went on a labor strike this past September 9. Outside groups helped prepare for this strike for months. The tremendous ability of workers to organize actions, even separated in different prisons, was deliberately blacked out by the major capitalist media.
A spokesperson for the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, explained:
Overseers watch over our every move, and if we do not perform our appointed tasks to their liking, we are punished. They may have replaced the whip with pepper spray, but many of the other torments remain: isolation, restraint positions, stripping off our clothes and investigating our bodies as though we are animals.
Federal prisoners make 12 to 40 cents an hour, while many state prisoners are paid nothing. If anything has changed in the last 45 years, the exploitation and treatment of prisoners is now worse. There’s an increase of overcrowding and convictions for the victimless crime of drug possessions, for which no other imperialist country imprisons its population.
In preparation for this nationwide strike, there have been many smaller local strikes over the last few months in prisons throughout the U.S. Prisoners realize that without their labor—cooking, cleaning, and maintenance—prisons come to a halt. Private manufacturing and commercial corporations also exploit their labor, in conditions approximating outright slavery.
Prison Labor is Slavery
In Douglas Blackmon’s 2008 book Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, he described this altered but continued form of slavery. But it didn’t end with World War II, as it continues in force today with the highest prison population in the world, both absolutely and proportionately. U.S. prisons house 2.2 million men and women, with Black and Latin workers disproportionately represented, due to the racist injustice system, but with roughly comparable total numbers of white workers. But today unity across racial lines led by Black prisoners stands out just as it did in the 1971Attica rebellion.
Mass imprisonment was revived with the “War on Crime” begun during the Johnson administration in the 1960s and continued with Bill Clinton’s tremendous acceleration of incarceration and enlargement of city police forces around the country—both liberal Democrat presidents. Both liberals and conservatives push for racist increases in prison populations, whether through “law and order” campaigns, “war on drugs,” or other forms of mass incarceration. We have only ourselves, the working class, to rely on.
Exploitation and extreme oppression of workers, both inside and outside of prisons, will only end when millions of workers everywhere join and help to build the PLP to lead a global revolution to rid the world of capitalism. In its place, we must organize a worldwide communist system run by workers, for the benefit of humanity as a whole (minus the former bosses and their supporters). Communism will be based on our vital needs, with no possibility of profitmaking.