Vol. 79/No. 21      June 8, 2015

Printed below are excerpts from “Why Attica Exploded” by Mary-Alice Waters, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party. The article was first published in the Oct. 1, 1971, Militant and then in the Pathfinder pamphlet Attica: Why Prisoners Are Rebelling, which is out of print. Copyright © 1972 Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

The most reactionary and racist commentators simply attempt to justify the Attica massacre with the assertion that the men caged up there are criminals — i.e., guilty of acts defined as crimes by our “free” society. They are, therefore, not like “other people.” They are “uncivilized,” “antisocial,” and if they are treated like animals, it is because they are, after all, subhuman.

But millions of other Americans were struck by the elementary justice of the demands for which the Attica rebels were willing even to die. They were stunned by the brutal inhumanity of the murderous state officials. …

One of the recurring topics in the post-Attica commentary on the prisons has been the “new mood” in the prisons, the emergence of a supposedly new kind of inmate. As Steven V. Roberts of the New York Times commented September 19, 1971: “A ‘movement’ paralleling those that have arisen in recent years among Blacks, students and women has now begun to emerge in the nation’s prisons.” …

Richard R. Korn … observed in the September 19 New York Times that “more and more (prisoners) are organizing politically and their political organizing is bringing them closer to the one objective prison administrators most dread: militant unity.” …

In the year preceding the rebellion, Pathfinder Press received close to fifty literature orders from Attica prison alone, covering titles like Malcolm X’s By Any Means Necessary, James P. Cannon’s Socialism on Trial, Trotsky’s Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It, The Essential Works of Lenin, Etheridge Knight’s Black Voices from Prison, and George Breitman’s How a Minority Can Change Society. There were six subscribers to the revolutionary socialist weekly The Militant in Attica at the time of the rebellion.

A number of aspects of this new political consciousness, militancy, and unity point towards the deeply revolutionary implications of what is happening in the prisons today. Many of the observers on the scene at Attica commented on the militant class solidarity of the rebels, on the unity in struggle among Black, Puerto Rican, and white rebels, and the apparent absence of racial conflict among them. …

There will almost certainly be more Atticas. Those who foresee more revolts and bloody reprisals are usually arguing for faster prison reform measures and fearing — correctly — that they will not come rapidly enough. Such reforms are vitally necessary. Every improvement in the physical surroundings, every victory that gains a few more human and civil rights for society’s victims, will help make life just that much more bearable for them. But even the most humane prison is still a prison, and the reason there will be more Atticas is lodged in the very function of prisons in this capitalist society. Such revolts will recur so long as men and women are put behind bars for disobeying the inhuman laws of this society and struggling against its inequities — that is, as long as capitalism remains intact.

What does this society define as a crime? Almost all “crimes” are acts which violate the sacred right of private property upon which class society rests — the right of the few to control and benefit from wealth that belongs to all. “Crimes” are acts which break rules set up to guarantee the rights of a small handful, their right to condemn the masses of humanity to misery, exploitation, disease, starvation, and death — if it is profitable. The fact that the targets of “criminal” acts are most often the poor themselves only attests to the success of the rulers in setting the victims of class society to prey upon each other. Even murder, rape, and other “crimes of violence” can ultimately be traced, almost without exception, to the social inequities, and distortions of human potential and character that are rooted in capitalist society.

The prisons of this country exist for one reason — to try to terrorize people into accepting an inhuman, irrational social system based on maintaining the “rights” of the few over the majority. Once capitalism is eliminated, once it is replaced by a system which can provide abundantly for the needs of the many rather than the profits of a tiny handful, once we have eradicated all the distortions of human potential which flow from this inhuman system and the institutions that prop it up, there will be no need for prisons. …

Only a revolutionary upheaval strong enough to take power out of the hands of the Rockefellers and Nixons and place it in the hands of the oppressed and exploited … only such a fundamental reorganization of society can bring about the necessary changes. That is the “prison reform” we are ultimately working for.
 
 
Related articles:
Unsealed files show 1971 Attica prison officials’ reign of terror
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home