Life is Revolution continued

U of F Interview, pt 3

UoF: If George was writing that fascism is here in 1970, we have to understand which stage of fascism we are in today, and develop a corresponding level of resistance. At his time, there was an anti-imperialist underground of active guerrilla formations—not the case today, but I think people are beginning to ask these questions again because of the escalating repression and because the Al-Aqsa Flood put the question of armed resistance back on the table. In our view, the contradictions are really intensified internationally and domestically right now, the most they have been in our lifetimes.

JPJ Jr: Fully agree. But here's what I think about that, and you'll see this specificity with me over and over and over again because maybe it's my training at the discursive level. I think the term at hand and what needs to be remembered always is apply. Because the thing is, the situation when I wrote the foreword [to Soledad Brother] in 1994, the situation when George was writing in '68 or '71, it is not quite accurate to just say he was writing about things that are happening today. That doesn't work, at least not in my philosophical understanding about how time works. And so what we have to understand is how to apply these things to a world that George obviously could have never imagined and that I couldn't have imagined when I wrote that foreword at 23 years old.

I also believe that it is our job as leftists who don't shy away from confrontation and conflict when it's necessary to do a better job of translating of our situation and what is going on for us at the moment.