Abolish Slavery Now
by John Kendall Hawkins
When I look back fondly, and sentimentally, and for some way back to the fire once in my belly, I inevitably transport my 'memories' to the 60s again. I think of Abbie Hoffman all the time now; I miss him; I miss his taking on the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) almost singlehandedly: throwing small bills down on the Wall Street brokers in the pit below the balcony and watching them snorke-porkle after the cash slopped on the floor; negotiating with Pentagon representatives on how high he would be allowed to levitate the bastion of battlehood, and he started out at 22 feet and the Pentagon negotiated down to three feet. Jesus, I miss Abbie.
But, also from that period, came the fiery and linguistically explosive Afro Queen, Angela Y. Davis. She has been on my mind lately. Some say she is still a controversial figure, even as a tenured professor in philosophy at UCLA. She started out her education in radical politics and militant humanity at Brandeis University (near Boston). studying under Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School of thought. Abbie learned and loved at Brandeis, too, studying under Abe Maslow, father of self-actualization fame (and of whom Timothy Leary once remarked, "The paradox was, as everybody knows, that Abe himself was a deeply depressed person. Abe told me once he never had a peak experience." (Rolls eyes.) Abbie and Angela were my Ebony and Ivory radicals, the one giving the finger to The Man, the other wanting to blow him up. At least, that's her reputation.
Abbie is dead: Long live Abbie. But Angela lives on in the flesh and in the mind.
I like to think I had one thing in common with the two of them: Brandeis. I got a full graduate scholarship to Brandeis in 1985. English Lit. I wanted to go there because Abbie had gone there. He'd been on the tennis team. I didn't know Angela had been there. But I eschewed (gesundheit) the scholarship offer to study philosophy among electrical engineers at RPI in Troy, NY, and now I'm doing research for a PhD and seeing the Internet as a hivemind. And I later got a CCNA and an MCSE, like Edward Snowden, and was, like him, considered a systems engineer. And on campus I could swear that I heard an electrical twitter in my right ear. My girlfriend at that time heard it, too. I'm not always sure I survived that car crash in Rockville, MD, in 1993, and may have died instead of going overseas, where I have been lost and thinking this ain't Dante's Purgtorio and no bubbly buxom Beatrice is waiting for me at the end of the rainbow. But yeah.
Angela Davis's new book, Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, is just out, published by the "radically independent nonprofit" (rolls eyes) Haymarket Books. While she's replaced her fiery rhetoric with textual erudition, her causes and themes remain the same. In this volume, she returns to her familiar examination of the meaning and implementation of abolition -- and its co-evolution with capitalist exploitation of African Americans since the Reconstruction days following the US Civil War. She locates this tension in the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution, which she succinctly (and repeatedly, as if to drive the point home to thick-witted types),
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or anyplace subject to their jurisdiction. [Davis's emphasis]
The exception is the rub. Except for. How can it be exploited by trough-happy capitalist pigs slippyslopping their way through the trough as a lifestyle?
In Abolition, Davis argues that the Exception Clause negates the abolition of slavery by providing a means for capitalist exploiters to garner fresh labor for few if any wages. Davis equates the PIC to the MIC. both of which were rallying points for change in the more radical 60s and 70s than now, writing:
There is an ironic but telling similarity between the economic impact of the prison industrial complex and that of the military industrial complex, with which it shares important structural features. Both systems simultaneously produce vast profits and social destruction. What is beneficial to the corporations, politicians, and state entities involved in systems brings blight and death to poor and racially marginalized communities throughout the world.
The vast profits, according to a 2022 American Civil Liberty Union, came to $11bn annually.
This focus alone makes the book worth reading, as it provides a 'woke'-up call to a comfortably numb (h/t Pink Floyd) public, largely white, largely middle class, that is unaware of the corporate connection to prison labor in may of the products and services they enjoy, such as Whole Foods, McDonald's, Starbucks, Verizon, Fidelity Investments, and American Airlines. But there are many more companies participating, as outlined in a study by Corporate Accountability Lab. Says the Lab, every state has an iron in the fire, except Alaska.
It's all part of the convict-leasing system that grew after the end of the Civil War, ostensibly to end slavery, but which got transmogrified into the more insidious form which saw black folks charged with ludicrous crimes and sentenced absurdly. Reveal News tells us,
Southern states imprisoned mainly Black men, often for minor crimes, and then leased them out to private companies - for years, even decades, at a time...people as young as 12 worked under inhumane conditions in coal mines and inferno-like ovens used to produce iron.
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