Concrete Conditions
Although a prolific writer, Shima has a way of saying a lot with a little. For example, we got into a conversation about critical race theory once, and before I could finish my question, he inadvertently chuckled.
“Yeah, critical race theory,” he said. “How come when they talk about anyone else’s past it’s ‘history,’ but my past is theoretical?”
Pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?
To move beyond the realm of the theoretical, I asked Heshima about crime and punishment in the context of a fully enacted AIM. I knew he was too intelligent and realistic to envision a utopia, but I asked him anyway. Was there no punishment in AIM because the structures had extinguished the fires that fuel criminalization?
Heshima, expectedly, rejected the idea of a utopian society and laid out two groups of offenders based on the level of harm their crime may inflict: reparable and irreparable.
“There are a number of restorative justice methods that can be used to correct behavior contrary to the values of the community without the person needing to be purged from society itself,” Heshima explained. “But if someone goes so far as to rape a sister or murder someone, they might need to be exiled.”
I pounced.
“That sounds like a fine line to walk,” I said. “I mean, in my mind, you’re in exile, so any system that includes exile would simply be a regurgitation of the oppressive system you worked to free yourself from. How do you reconcile that?”
Oh man, I was so proud of myself. I thought I’d out-abolitioned a true abolitionist. It was short-lived.
“Prison is an irrational punishment because incapacitation makes redemption and reparations impossible,” Heshima said. “What I’m talking about is a period of time where this person is cast outside the bounds of the community—not caged, just relocated—until both internal developmental progress and external developmental restitution are made.
“So if you take somebody’s life, you should be responsible for filling that void,” he continued. “If that person provided for a family, you are now responsible for providing for that family.”
It made so much sense it almost made me mad. Not because I hadn’t tripped him up, but because in explaining a system that diverts from the present one, Heshima revealed some maddening truths about America’s criminal legal system I hadn’t even thought of.
The breadwinner of a family is killed. Are garnished wages from someone making pennies doing prison labor going to actually support the family left behind? Absurd. My own conditioning had reared its head: I hadn’t even thought about the element of redemption.
“I believe everyone can make a mistake, but no one should be barred from the capacity to change,” Heshima said. “It’s the only constant in nature: things either grow or they die.”
Autonomous Infrastructure Mission proposes abandoning the current system and creating a new society perhaps geographically within its bounds but wholly independent of it. AIM accomplishes this through closed-circuit economics, seen in communities like Black Wall Street, but moreover through redefining education, safety, and community.
Perhaps it’s easier for Heshima to abandon the current system because it has abandoned him. While California does not have explicit civil death laws—legal language that recognizes prisoners as having the same rights as a dead person—it might as well. Heshima’s mail is constantly confiscated and his possession of certain books has been met with disciplinary citations. First Amendment: freedom of speech. His cell is tossed on a regular basis, his communications are screened by the mail staff, and his telephone calls are monitored. Fourth Amendment: right to privacy. In 2022 the US Supreme Court made a series of rulings that denied prisoners due process, gutting their ability to present evidence they were not adequately represented (Shinn v. Ramirez, 596 US ___, decided May 23, 2022) and their right to provide proof of their innocence (Jones v. Hendrix, 599 US ___, decided June 22, 2022). Fifth Amendment: right to due process and fair procedures. Fourteenth Amendment: equal protection under the law. In total, Heshima spent eighteen years and eight months in solitary confinement. Eighth Amendment: cruel and unusual punishment.
“If they was to let me out today on parole, they could pull me over, search my car, come to my house in the middle of the night, pull me outta my bed, flip my mattress over, strip search me . . . and there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it, because I’m not a person. I’m still J38283,” Heshima said, referring to his prisoner ID. “That makes sense in this society, where if I was a ruling class element, or I was one of their tools like law enforcement and I was tasked with ensuring the continuation of this way of life, the guys whom I would make sure to keep my boot on they neck or my hand on they shoulder would be the guys who have very little interest in the continuation of such a system.”
I imagined Heshima sitting in solitary, enclosed by concrete, with the dim glow of the hallway halogens seeping through the cracks of his food slot. Between his rights being stripped away and the darkness of Pelican Bay’s solitary unit, it must have felt like an actual tomb. How was it that, so detached from society, he was able to envision a way to build a new one?
“I don’t think it’s hard for him to imagine,” Duvon said. “The steps of AIM are very similar to how we grew up: Our mom planted a garden every year, had us eat cracked wheat with butter and salt for breakfast, fed our neighbors. Our dad taught us not to get trapped in the bad things that happen to you, to move on, to share your knowledge with the person who’s coming up behind you.”
For Heshima, the separation allowed him the time and space to perform a “concrete analysis of concrete conditions,” a phrase coined by Mao and embraced by the Black Panther Party. It is the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism, which views historical and political events as the result of a series of contradictions or social conflicts.18 With the world outside prison frozen in time, Heshima is able to examine these moments of conflict and contradiction, analyzing not the world he cannot access, but the history he can.
“The origin of our resistance lies in the very nature of the core contradictions of capitalist society in conflict with the advanced elements of its most oppressed strata: the bourgeois state’s attempt to stamp out revolutionary sentiment amongst the lumpen-proletariat in hopes of maintaining and expanding its reactionary character,” Heshima wrote in the Bay View. “[This is] in contrast with the struggle of political and politicized prisoners to raise the consciousness and revolutionary character of the entire underclass, all while resisting the fascist state’s attempts to silence our dissent, crush our will to struggle and foment defection.”19
(Told you he’s prolific.)
The World Right Now by Scotty Scott aka Scott W. Smith
7
Conclusion:
Beyond Freedom
Oftentimes freedom is so elusive that just having a taste of it becomes a goal unto itself. But without a sure path forward, history has taught us, new systems often imitate the ones they replaced.
I was talking to a friend of mine from Egypt, who attended Cairo University during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Buoyed by the eruption of the Arab Spring less than a year before, citizens across Egypt flooded the streets with flags, banners, and posters, banding together to withstand an intense military retaliation. For the majority of President Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year authoritarian rule, the people suffered economic hardship and brutal campaigns by the country’s armed forces. Their thirst for freedom kept them on the streets for eighteen days until Mubarak resigned from his position, giving power over to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
It was a massive undertaking, requiring the unprecedented mobilization of Egyptians from all socioeconomic backgrounds and costing the lives of 846 civilians.1 Their unlikely success had benefits and drawbacks: They had found freedom, but it had been theoretical for so long, and no one had planned beyond grasping it.
This vacuum left in the aftermath of the revolution allowed room for the military to step in under the guise of maintaining order while the country found its footing. Boosted by its newfound power and influence, forces eventually mounted a military coup against the first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi. Subsequent clashes between the military and pro-Morsi protestors led to hundreds more civilian deaths. The military’s political and economic stronghold on the state ultimately led to a return to authoritarianism. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former minister of defense who led the military coup against Morsi, has defined his presidency by repressing public dissent—including forceful crackdowns on protests and freedom of the press—and economic policies that have led to extreme poverty; an estimated 20 million Egyptians are living at or below the poverty line.2
The Egyptian revolution can inform the current movement for liberation in the US in several ways. First and foremost, it proves revolution is possible. But it also provides a warning: Freedom is not an end in itself.
This volume has examined several evolutions of slavery—the prison-industrial complex, felony disenfranchisement, mass incarceration, economic disparities, redlining, and community destabilization. True freedom requires an account of all of these and a plan to ensure future evolutions do not occur.
“A new civil rights movement cannot be organized around the relics of the earlier system of control if it is to address meaningfully the racial realities of our time,” Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow. “Any racial justice movement, to be successful, must vigorously challenge the public consensus that underlies the prevailing system of control.”3
So hit the streets, organize mass protests, and make your voices heard. But attach yourself to a plan for the future, lest someone else plans it for you.
Brace Yourselves
The current landscape for activism is not for the faint of heart. This year police are on track to kill more people than any other year in the last decade. It doesn’t even matter which year you’re reading this. Fatal police shootings have increased annually since 2019.
There is also a well-organized counteroffensive already in full gear. The FBI is known to have used COINTELPRO tactics as recently as 2020, when the agency recruited an informant to infiltrate Black Lives Matter protests in Denver.4 These active campaigns to undermine the integrity of racial justice movements are being deployed before the movement has a chance to fully heal from the damage of the last infiltration efforts, which led to the assassinations of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. These wounds can be felt in the forms of constant in-fighting and divisive rhetoric meant to keep BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) groups from banding together in a unified stand against white supremacy. They’ve also infected racial justice movements with horizontal prejudice, a term that acknowledges how individuals in a targeted racial group actually reinforce oppressive and discriminatory systems.
To be in the struggle for racial justice often feels Sisyphean. Endurance to press on in the face of ignorance and slow-turning wheels of justice and democracy seems impossible to maintain, but it is not. At the Shabazz Center’s fifty-eighth commemoration of Malcolm X’s death, Angela Davis said, “How is it possible to remain committed over so many centuries, over so many generations, to this struggle for freedom? That is phenomenal, that each generation has passed on that impulse to fight for freedom to the next.”5
