“I have seen cases of people who are put in the SHU and deemed gang members because they have academic books by the Black Panthers or journal writings about African-American history. Even the materials for gang investigators teach that the use of the words ‘tío’ or ‘hermano,’ ‘uncle’ or ‘brother’ in Spanish, can indicate gang activity.”

California prisons torture inmates for reading about black liberation or for speaking Spanish.

The racism California’s prisoners are fighting does not stop there. They also demand an end to group punishments, including what ProPublica‘s Christie Thompson calls “race-based lockdowns that restrict an entire race of inmates for one prisoner’s violation.” This kind of collective punishment should disgust all who believe in individual rights. Anyone who values freedom, equality, or human dignity should support California’s striking prisoners. But we should not stop there.

The prisoners seek an end to some of the worst abuses of the prison system. We should demand an end to the prison system itself. The prison system is a continuation of slavery. The 13th Amendment prohibits slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” So rather than abolishing slavery, the 13th Amendment simply changed its form. After the Civil War, Southern states used the Black Codes to criminalize blacks. This created forced labor that was arguably worse than slavery. As Angela Davis explains:

Slave owners may have been concerned for the survival of individual slaves, who, after all, represented significant investments. Convicts, on the other hand, were leased not as individuals, but as a group, and they could be worked literally to death without affecting the profitability of a convict crew.

This extension of slavery continues today.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as “Angola,” was converted from a slave plantation to a prison, and is still used for forced agricultural labor. Sweatshop conditions exist in prisons across the country. Companies like Walmart, AT&T, and Starbucks all profit from this slave labor. So do war profiteers like BAE, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. The racism of slavery persists; 60% of prisoners are people of color. The abolitionist movement has some unfinished business, and it can only be resolved through prison abolition.

Prison abolitionism is often seen as utopian, but I believe it is one of the most practical causes activists can work towards. I support three core tactics for resisting and eventually abolishing prisons:

1. Support prisoners. Act in solidarity with prisoners who resist, such as the hunger strikers. Write letters to prisoners. Raise money for their commissary or send them books. While these sorts of actions will not abolish prisons on their own, they help prisoners survive incarceration, and they can help build a resistance movement on all sides of  prison walls.

2. Resist the prison growth industry. Organize against construction of any new prisons, jails, and detention centers. Divest from banks that profit off prisons, such as Wells Fargo, and urge others to do the same. Expose prison profiteers like Jane Marquardt and undermine their political influence. Film cops, finance legal defenses, and promote jury nullification, so fewer people are sent to prison.

3. Build alternatives to prisons. For example, LGBT people of color in New York run a Safe Neighborhood Campaign, which trains local businesses and community groups to stop violence without calling the police. Women organize many grassroots projects to defend themselves from gender violence in an America where 97% of rapists are never sent to prison.

Building alternatives to police and prisons can make communities safer and end the state’s monopoly on security and justice. Abolishing prisons is a moral imperative. But moreover, it’s a practical plan.

You might have thought that the proper day was Labor Day, as traditionally celebrated on the first Monday in September. Not so; the federal holiday known as Labor Day is actually a Gilded Age bait-and-switch from 1894. It was crafted and promoted in an effort to throw a bone to labor while erasing the radicalism implicit in May Day (a holiday declared by workers, in honor of the campaign for the eight hour day and in memory of the Haymarket martyrs). As a low-calorie substitute for workers’ struggle to come into their own, we get a celebration of labor … so long as it rigidly adheres to the AFL-line orthodoxy of collective bargaining, appeasement, and power to the union bosses and government bureaucrats. That this holiday emerged and solidified at exactly the same historical moment as the unholy alliance of conservative (statist, nativist, racist, and misogynist) unionism with corporate barons and the Progressive regulation movement is no coincidence. That AFL-line unions continue to use Labor Day as a chance to co-opt the historic successes of radical, libertarian unions in campaigns such as the fight for the eight-hour day or the five-day week is no coincidence, either.

Too many of my comrades on the Left fall into the trap of taking the Labor Day version of history for granted: modern unions are trumpeted as the main channel for the voice of workers; the institutionalization of the system through the Wagner Act and the National Labor Relations Board in 1935, and the ensuing spike in union membership during the New Deal period, are regarded as one of the great triumphs for workers of the past century.

You may not be surprised to find out that I don’t find this picture of history entirely persuasive. The Wagner Act was the capstone of years of government promotion of conservative, AFL-line unions in order to subvert the organizing efforts of decentralized, uncompromising, radical unions such as the IWW and to avoid the previous year’s tumultuous general strikes in San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis. The labor movement as we know it today was created by government bureaucrats who effectively created a massive subsidy program for conservative unions which followed the AFL and CIO models of organizing—which emphatically did not include general strikes or demands for worker ownership of firms. Once the NRLB-recognized unions had swept over the workforce and co-opted most of the movement for organized labor, the second blow of the one-two punch fell: government benefits always mean government strings attached, and in this case it was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which pulled the activities of the recognized unions firmly into the regulatory grip of the federal government. Both the internal culture of post-Wagner mainstream unions, and the external controls of the federal labor regulatory apparatus, have dramatically hamstrung the labor movement for the past half-century. Union methods are legally restricted to collective bargaining and limited strikes (which cannot legally be expanded to secondary strikes, and which can be, and have been, broken by arbitrary fiat of the President). Union hiring halls are banned. Union resources have been systematically sapped by banning closed shop contracts, and encouraging states to ban union shop contracts—thus forcing unions to represent free-riding employees who do not join them and do not contribute dues. Union demands are effectively constrained to modest (and easily revoked) improvements in wages and conditions. And, since modern unions can do so little to achieve their professed goals, and since their professed goals have been substantially lowered anyway, unionization of the workforce continues its decades-long slide.

May Day is a celebration of the original conception of the labor movement, as expressed by anarchist organizers such as Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons, Benjamin Tucker, and others: a movement for workers to come into their own, by banding together, supporting one another, and taking direct action in the form of boycotts, work stoppages, general strikes, and the creation of workers’ spaces such as local co-operatives and union hiring halls. The spirit was best expressed by John Brill’s famous exhortation to Dump the bosses off your back—by which he did not mean to go to a government mediator and get them to make the boss sit down with you and work out a slightly more beneficial arrangement. Dump the bosses off your back!meant: organize and create local institutions that let you bypass the bosses. Negotiate with them if it’ll do some good; ignore them if it won’t. The signal achievements of the labor movement in the late 19^th and early 20^th century were achievements in this spirit: the campaigns that won the 8 hour day and the weekend off in many workplaces, for example, emerged from a unilateral work stoppage by rank-and-file workers, declared by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, and organized especially by the explicitly anarchist International Working People’s Association, after legislative efforts by the National Labor Union and the Knights of Labor failed. The stagnant, or even backsliding, state of organized labor over the past half century is the direct result of government colonization and the ascendency of government-subsidized unions.

Don’t get me wrong: the modern labor movement, for all its flaws and limitations, is the reflection (no matter how distorted) of an honorable effort; it deserves our support and does some good. Union bosses, corporate bosses, and government bureaucrats may work to co-opt organized labor to their own ends, but rank-and-file workers have perfectly good reasons to support AFL-style union organizing: modern unions may not be accountable enough to rank-and-file workers, but they aremore accountable than corporate bureaucracy; modern unions bosses don’t care enough about giving workers direct control in their own workplace, but they care more than corporate bosses, who make most of their living by denying workers such control. The labor movement, like all too many other honorable movements for social justice in the 20^th century, has become a prisoner of politics: a political situation has been created in which the most rational thing for most workers to do is to muddle through with a co-opted and carefully regulated labor movement that helps them in some ways but undermines their long-term prospects. It doesn’t make sense to respond to a situation like that with blanket denunciations of organized labor; the best thing to do is to support our fellow workers within the labor movement as it is constrained today, but also to work to change the political situation that constrains it, and to set it free. That means loosening the ties that bind the union bosses to the corporate and government bureaucrats, by working to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, and abolish the apparatus of the NLRB, and working to build free, vibrant, militant unions once again.

Dump the bosses off your back. Free the unions, and all political prisoners!

A conscious populace can discard a system that does not work for them. The current political system solidly maintains the power of politicians and their supporters over the general populace. Office-holders and their corporate partners make deals with each other to keep their faction in charge — and the maintenance of a stable power structure is essential to enabling them to rule. Fortunately the system is composed of people, and those people are bound by the political necessities of good appearances, by rivalries among rulers, and by the consciences of the enforcers. All the weapons money can buy are only as effective as the individuals operating them.

Of course, any challenge to the system holds the dangers of wasting effort to perpetuate the system or adopting one that is no better. A brutal reaction might be unleashed, new elites could become rulers, or rebels might maintain or expand the privileges of the old system instead of leveling the system for mutual benefit.

To prevent the rise of new tyranny, the mobilized public must respect individual liberty and know how to safeguard it.  It is of prime importance to consistently and effectively call out the lie that elites and rulers are necessary. The power-hungry will always claim they will exploit less than the other guy, and make the unstated assumption that exploitation is a necessity.

But exploitation and rulership are not needed to maintain a peaceful and prosperous society of freedom. Instead, power can be dispersed among equals. Elites provide nothing that cannot be better provided without them.

Security? Elites undermine it, and the foundations of true security are social bonds and solidarity that thugs are keen to disrupt.

Transportation infrastructure? The system builds according to the demands of power, sometimes demolishing neighborhoods in the process, and skims off into the pockets of numerous cronies before it delivers anything.

Education? People are eager to learn and teach, and only authoritarian structures, administrative excess, and the nonsense used to prop up the system obstructs them.

Environmental protection? Elites market green and pass laws, but encourage waste and destruction.

And so on. Power structures are made to support the powerful, and people do best by getting rid of them.

A populace that liberates itself has the chance to explore new options: ad-hoc neighborhood councils with common membership, the division of state organizations among mutual ownership shares, and whatever other arrangements satisfied the needs of safeguarding the equal liberty of all individuals to live as they want without infringing on others’ liberty. The groundwork for liberation can be laid by building networks and spreading ideas online and in person. But one must act when action is happening.

Events have shown that people do not need to defer to authority or wait for permission to take power from tyrants. If the masses retain power and show a widespread respect for individual autonomy instead of ceding power and liberty to ambitious politicians, an era of unprecedented human freedom will be safeguarded.