Maroon the Implacable

Russell Maroon Shoatz

Description

Russell Maroon Shoatz is a political prisoner who has been held unjustly for over thirty years, including two decades in solitary confinement. He was active as a leader in the Black Liberation Movement in Philadelphia, both above and underground. His successful escapes from maximum-security prisons earned him the title “Maroon.” This is the first published collection of his accumulated written works, and also includes new essays written expressly for this volume.

Despite the torture and deprivation that has been everyday life for Maroon over the last several decades, he has remained at the cutting edge of history through his writings. His work is innovative and revolutionary on multiple levels:
• His self-critical and fresh retelling of the Black liberation struggle in the U.S. includes many practical and theoretical insights;
• His analysis of the prison system, particularly in relation to capitalism, imperialism, and the drug war, takes us far beyond the recently-popular analysis of the Prison Industrial Complex, contained in books such as The New Jim Crow;
• His historical research and writings on Maroon communities throughout the Americas, drawing many insights from these societies in the fields of political and military revolutionary strategy are unprecedented; and finally
• His sharp and profound understanding of the current historical moment, with clear proposals for how to move forward embracing new political concepts and practices (including but not limited to eco-socialism, matriarchy and eco-feminism, food security, prefiguration and the Occupy Wall Street movement) provide cutting-edge challenges for today’s movements for social change.

Sujets

• Anti-imperialism
• Prison?industrial complex
• Socialism
• Feminism
• Ecology
• Abolition

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604868531
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Praise for Maroon the Implacable
"This book, Maroon the Implacable, is that very funky instruction manual on how to make revolution against Imperialist America."
Amiri Baraka, poet, essayist, and activist; former poet laureate of New Jersey
"The occult history of America concerns a space where Black, Red, and white together produce the culture of resistance and the permanent uprising against hegemonic power and alienation. This space could be called the hideout of the Maroons, those few who have made the revolutionary exodus from the world of slavery to the ‘inaccessible’ wilderness of an alternate universe. If the Great Dismal Swamp is no longer a refuge, nevertheless the message of the Maroons lives on, and Russell Maroon Shoatz is today its untamed voice. Free Maroon the Implacable!"
Hakim Bey, author of TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone
"Russell Maroon Shoatz wrote the essays in this book during thirty cumulative years of solitary confinement under conditions that international law would consider ‘cruel and inhuman.’ The essays trace a remarkable political trajectory, starting with involvement with the gang world of Philadelphia, leading to membership in the Black Panther Party, and ending with full-hearted support for ecofeminism and a repudiation of the patriarchal violence he once embraced. At the core of the book is the theme of marronage the will to escape from conditions of enslavement at any cost. This is what Russell Maroon Shoatz has done, not only physically, but in the world of ideas by escaping from the rigid patriarchal framework he inherited and revaluing and promoting the role of women in the history of liberation. This book is a document of this transformation carried out against tremendous odds and told with searing honesty."
Silvia Federici, author of Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle and Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
"Russell Maroon Shoatz’s life reads like fiction composed by Victor Hugo. But this Jean Valjean for our time is the living truth, and his writings are a beacon for a new, revolutionary age. What a treasure has here been uncovered!"
Joel Kovel, author of White Racism: A Psychohistory and The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?
"The message of Russell Maroon Shoatz, the message of the revolutionary maroon, is a message that we ignore only at our own peril and that of our world. Prison is designed to crush the soul, deaden the mind and destroy the spirit, but it becomes for some, like Maroon, a place for new awakening, deeper insights, and expanded solidarity. As Maroon shows, the awakened prisoner understands the contradictions of the state, capitalism, and patriarchy in a way that most of us, living in our larger and more comfortable prisons, can hardly begin to understand. We are living in Babylon, and Babylon must be destroyed. Our brothers and sisters in prison are uniquely gifted to help lead us out of captivity. The message of the revolutionary maroon is that ‘exodus is the primary form class struggle takes today.’ This idea, that we must learn to create and to live together in communities of liberation and solidarity, communities that openly defy and negate the brutal oppression of capital, state and patriarchy, is the precisely correct message for our time."
John P. Clark, professor of environmental studies and philosophy at Loyola University, author of The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism
"He escaped from custody two times, and although recaptured and imprisoned under horrific conditions, Russell has not relinquished his spirit of resistance. He is the ‘Maroon.’ If more young men emulated his lifestyle, the liberation of Black people would be very near at hand."
Herman Ferguson, friend and comrade of Malcolm X in the Organization for Afro-American Unity
"In describing human traits, it has been said that they come in two types: one, a thermostat, the other, a thermometer. These two objects look identical, and oftentimes confuse people. They can be identical in size and shape: equipped with mercury, allowing both to reflect temperatures, thus making it even harder to distinguish between them. The one big difference, however, is that the thermostat is equipped with a mechanism that not only allows it to reflect temperatures but also allows it to control temperatures. If I had to describe Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz (besides giving him his props for being a man of substance, courage, and principles) he without doubt would be a thermostat: Possessing the ability to not only reflect but control temperatures as well. This book, Maroon the Implacable, enforces and gives credence to this concept … a compelling read!"
Robert Hillary King, prison justice activist, author of From the Bottom of the Heap, and former prisoner in solitary confinement in the Angola prison in Louisiana
"Many people will be astonished to discover the perspective of Russell Maroon Shoatz when they finally read his work. Though he’s been inside for forty of his sixty-nine years on earth, the problems he raises about the justice movement are amazingly up to date; for example, what to do about the organizations that claim to represent the movement but work overtime to control it? And he writes without jargon and even without rancor, though there is plenty to be bitter about. He asks not why we struggle we should know that by now! but how we organize to struggle. He is dedicated without being dogmatic and I know from experience that his mind is open and very keen for the views of others. Above all, he thinks organizationally, rather than in mangled, arrogant, academic rhetoric. He is always trying to work out what to do. Where he looks for answers is the only sensible place: not in ideas but in the historical experience of the grassroots. His ‘Dragon and the Hydra’ provokes and invites a dialogue with activists a pleasure I for one look forward to."
Selma James, author of Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning, and coordinator of Global Women’s Strike
"For twenty-seven years I visited four prisoners, one of whom was Russell Shoatz, who we called Maroon. From him I always got a lesson in politics that fortified me and made me understand just what was happening in our country and what I should be doing about it. Just before Mumia was moved out of SCI Greene, he was able to talk with Maroon for two whole days. He told me that those two glorious days were more important to him than all the years he was unable to communicate with Maroon. Maroon never lost his faith in the people, nor his ability to cut through the lies fed to us by the media. He trusted the truth of ‘power to the people,’ and it kept him focused and hopeful. His body was incarcerated but his mind soared. My mentor!"
Frances Goldin, publisher of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Barbara Kingsolver, and Adrienne Rich
"Wow! I have been an organizer during the Great Slave Rebellion of the 1960s, to the urban bus riders of today, to the prison rebellions of tomorrow. Shoatz, combining George Jackson and W.E.B. Du Bois, is a fine historian behind bars who writes like a novelist. Whether the maroons were real (which they were) or superheroes (which they also were), the tale of free Blacks, runaway slaves, Amerindians, and working-class whites building a revolutionary army in the swamps is exciting stuff and just the level of imagery and imagination we need to rebuild the revolution today."
Eric Mann, author of Comrade George: An Investigation into the Life, Political Thought, and Assassination of George Jackson
"More than ever, I am convinced that the answers to human society’s dilemmas will come from the margins of our society, from those people who have been excluded or who have chosen the path of exodus, and who are building alternatives in whatever isolated place they can make a stand. As Russell Maroon Shoatz shows us, even someone locked away in solitary confinement for decades, can utilize his imagination to show us ‘ordinary citizens’ the way forward. This exciting collection of writings explores paths of action for all of us: feminists, revolutionaries, community activists, ecosocialists, human rights campaigners. Extraordinary hidden histories of resistance combine with a vision of the future and a strategic challenge to every one of us to take action to change the world, wherever we are situated. To have your freedom denied to you is a terrible thing. To be held in solitary confinement is torture. No government should be allowed to abuse its citizens in this way, whatever their actions or beliefs. But not only should we support the call to Free Russell Maroon Shoatz we should be proud to associate with his ideals and his activism, and we should take up the challenge he is setting us from his prison cell, to establish a unifying ‘mosaic’ movement based on the principle of intercommunal self-determination."
Janet Cherry, South African activist and historian, former political detainee, and researcher for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
"With the little that I understand of English, I have been impressed to read of the life of Maroon and what he has written. I was also in prison, when the military tribunal that judged me didn’t dare to sentence me to death, which some were calling for. In the various prisons where I was held, in Peru and Argentina, I was treated worse than ordinary prisoners, even though from afar, much better than what Maroon suffers. I respect his fortitude and am grateful for his historical teachings.
"In Latin America, the slaves that escaped were called ‘cimarrones’ and their organizations ‘palenques,’ ‘quilombos,