No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner
by David Gilbert
Published by Abraham Guillen Press/Arm the
Spirit, Montreal, Quebec, 2004
ISBN 1-894925-26-2, $20, 284 pp.
Click here to order this book from AK Press
Reviewed by Michael Novick, Editor, Turning the
Tide
You may know David Gilbert from his appearance in the recently popular,
award-winning documentary "Weather Underground," which has played in art
houses around the US and is now available on DVD. If so, you know he is a
warm, engaging, committed, optimistic and insightful person, capable of unflinching
self-criticism but unyielding in his sharp critique of the empire, of white
and male supremacy, genocide and exploitation. If you haven't seen that film,
or the video "David Gilbert: A Lifetime of Struggle," you should definitely
get them or see them, as well as buying and reading this book of his perceptive
articles and book reviews.
"No Surrender" is a stimulating, wide-ranging and important collection
of essays, interviews and reviews by a Euro-American anti-imperialist political
prisoner. David Gilbert is a former member of SDS (Students for a Democratic
Society) and the Weather Underground Organization (WUO). He's serving a long
sentence in state prison in NY for participation in an expropriation by the
Revolutionary Armed Task Force of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), in which
lives were taken and lost. David has been an AIDS activist behind prison
walls for years, as well as a book reviewer from 1992-97 for 'Downtown' and
its sister publication. David selected and slightly edited writings from
a span of over 20+ years, beginning with his trial statements in 1982 and
1983, and concluding with reflections on the anti-war movement post-9/11
and in the wake of Bush's pre-emptive Iraq War. The material is not organized
chronologically but thematically (although the opening section does include
a memoir of his days in the New Left leading into the WUO, followed by the
court pieces. These make clear where David is coming from, why he is a political
prisoner, and the body of theory and practice from which his prison writings
emerge).
In the interest of full disclosure, I should acknowledge that I have
known David personally both before and since the events that made him a political
prisoner. I too, was active in SDS in the same period as he, was active in
defending him and the other RATF prisoners when they were put on trial, have
corresponded with him occasionally since he has been behind bars. I in fact
published an early version of one of the pieces included in this book, "AIDS
Conspiracy Theories: Tracking the Real Genocide," in Turning the Tide. (David
cites my own book, White Lies White Power, in that article.) So in engaging
the material in this book, I am not a disinterested critic, but a comrade
committed to winning freedom for David Gilbert and all political prisoners
and POWs, and to creating a better society and world to replace the imperialist
system in which we live.
One strikingly positive aspect of the book is David's striving to integrate
understandings about class and male supremacy into his grounding in support
for national liberation and opposition to white supremacy. His appreciation
for women's role in struggle and in life, as well as for the central importance
of women's liberation to any effort to remake the world, shines through the
whole volume. It extends beyond the sections specifically about challenging
male supremacy (such as his critique of Robert Bly's "Iron John,") and about
considering the revolutionary truths advanced by women of color (such as
his review of Barbara Smith's "The Truth That Never Hurts.")
Another particular strength of the book, reflecting David's practical
engagement in direct action strategies for dealing with the devastation of
AIDS inside the prison walls, is the material on AIDS in prison and on global
health. It is one of the longest sections in the book, and the most original
(particularly in the sense that it consists mostly of David's own direct
analysis and theorizing, as opposed to reviews of others' work). It poses
a tremendous challenge to us to deal with the genocidal impact of the AIDS
plague in Africa, Asia and among African and indigenous/'Latino' people in
the U.S. This segues logically into a section on the nature of imperialism
globally and then into reflections on current popular struggles for human
rights and de-colonization.
However, It would be a disservice to David and to the cause of human
liberation to which he has given so much and to which he continues to devote
himself, to simply praise the book and what he has to say in it. David is
striving to engage himself and us in a continuing revolutionary process,
defying the prison bars that contain his body but not his loving heart, inquiring
mind or indomitable spirit. His writings, and their publication in book form,
are a tremendous contribution to the struggle, but they are not meant to
be and should not be taken as the 'last word.' Rather, they are meant to
stimulate thinking, struggle, further study and analysis. David is still
trying to understand errors and weaknesses among popular and revolutionary
forces that have allowed imperialism to maintain its grip. He wants to figure
out how we can do better and win -- and we should be doing the same.
In that spirit, in addition to some key strengths of David's understandings
and exemplary theorizing and practical work, I will also look at some weaknesses,
some continuing issues that the book in its totality presents for him and
for us, requiring further examination and struggle. "No Surrender" is a very
meaty, diverse work, looking at movement history, white supremacy and theories
of white skin privilege, global capitalism, African oppression and liberation,
AIDS, women's oppression, resistance and liberation, lessons for the future,
as well as some personal and political humor and children's stories. Most
of it is presented through the prism of reviews of other people's work, which
David summarizes and critiques succinctly and effectively. As such, it merits
two or three readings. You may want to pursue some of the books and authors
he points out, too.
The thematic organization, while it helps to deepen the analysis and
exposition of a given topic by grouping several different writings together,
sometimes detracts from a sense of the development and transformation of
David Gilbert's thinking over time. In other words, each piece of material
does indicate when it was written, but they are not presented chronologically.
This is a shame, because David is committed to a historical and material
analysis. His thinking has not been static and frozen. It has grown and changed
through a process of self-criticism and of engagement in collective struggle
behind and through bars, as well as of political activism around new and
pressing issues as they have continued to arise since his incarceration.
A chronological index might have been a useful addition to this book. If
it is reprinted, as it hopefully will need to be, the publishers should consider
adding such an appendix, to make it easier to follow that process by reading
articles in sequence from the 80's, 90's and post-2000.
The book also offers valuable explications of the nature and origin
of white supremacy and the key role it plays in the maintenance and propagation
of imperialism. David reflects on Ted Allen's "White Supremacy in the U.S.",
"Black Reconstruction" by WEB DuBois, J. Sakai's "Settlers: The Myth of the
White Proletariat," and "Night Vision" by Butch Lee & Red Rover. It should
lead the reader unfamiliar with this material to read those important volumes
in their entirety. Compare your own critical assessments of the books with
David's evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses. David also very effectively
surveys material on the transformations taking place economically in the
imperialist system, sometimes referred to as globalization. He highlights
the important political economic understandings about the deepening exploitation
of the global South that such analysis has provided. He also critiques weaknesses
of not fully grounding such exposes in revolutionary opposition to the imperialist
system as a whole (as in his reviews of works by Walden Bello and Kevin Danegher,
among others).
There are however, a number of weaknesses in some of the articles in
the volume, some more troubling than others. One is that David Gilbert nowhere
grapples with anarchism -- in fact, I don't think the word anarchism appears
in the entire volume. Although he is critical of Stalinism, as the New Left
was, he does not draw out deeper lessons from some of the struggles he reflects
on. He remains convinced that what he describes as a disciplined combat organization
is essential to the process of liberation. David reflects on the crimes of
regimes like that of Pol Pot in Cambodia, laments the dictatorial and capitalistic
turn of "Communist" China, and discusses the desire on the part of the Zapatistas
in Mexico and the forest workers in Brazil to avoid hierarchical vanguard
approaches. But David nowhere in this volume expresses a thorough critique
of either vanguardism or the 'dictatorship of the proletariat.' Nor does
he address anarchist critiques of such concepts.
This is somewhat surprising, since he dedicates the book in part to
his comrade Kuwasi Balagoon of the BLA, to whose death from AIDS he also
credits his involvement in struggling over AIDS issues in prison. Kuwasi
Balagoon was a self-proclaimed anarchist whose advocacy of that was a central
element of his (Balagoon's) writing both before and after his incarceration.
Most people of a younger generation than David who will be interested in
this book are probably anarchists or influenced by anarchism, and even if
Gilbert discounts such politics, you'd think he would have been exposed to
them and want to address them. If he believes anarchism is a dead end, he
should state so forthrightly, respond to its critique of Marxism and Leninism,
and provide his countervailing arguments.
There are also strengths and weaknesses in his treatment of the WUO.
David is correct in emphasizing the positive aspect of the WUO's willingness
to build a clandestine armed resistance to imperialism, and his critique
of its errors is equally important. He states: "The downfall (of the WUO)
came from drifting back into the traditional failures of the white Left with
the politics of the 'multinational working class,' and a plan to be central
to 'leading' the 'whole U.S. revolution.' These positions negated the independent
and leading role of people of color...When those forces sharply criticized
us, we -- with our vitality sapped by the lack of internal democracy - couldn't
deal with it and instead split apart amid harsh recriminations."
This presentation is much franker than that made by other leaders of
the WUO in the recent documentary film Weather Underground, which attributes
the demise of the WUO to fatigue and the end of the war in Vietnam. In fact,
as David indicates, the WUO intended to resurface itself as the head of a
new communist party, akin to the other similar Maoist party-building efforts
such as the Revolutionary Communist Party or Line of March. Denial of the
anti-colonial nature of New Afrikan/Black, Mexicano, Puerto Rican and American
Indian/First Nations' struggles was and continues to be a key error of the
left.
However, this political error goes hand in hand with doctrines of centralism
and 'two-line struggle' in which all deviations from the party line are 'petty-bourgeois
errors' that must be recanted. An authentically anti-imperialist political
approach which recognizes and upholds the self-determination and independent,
leading role of the anti-colonial struggles of oppressed people -- oriented
towards smashing the empire and dismantling the federal state -- should naturally
lead to decentralized and anti-hierarchical forms of organization. But this
is not a direction David Gilbert seems to embrace. "As far as I know," he
says, "there is still no clear-cut successful model for combining the two
critical needs of a fully democratic internal process and of tight discipline
for fighting a ruthless state." The impulse towards restricting democratic
process to an 'internal' one, and the blindness to the use of headless networks
as a means of fighting and resisting the ruthless state, seem to be interconnected,
unexamined weaknesses in his thinking.
A related weakness is in his assessment of what has set back the struggle
globally since the beginning of the 80's. David Gilbert correctly attributes
this to a general failure of the struggles for national liberation after
the high-water marks of the success of the Vietnamese revolutionary war against
U.S. imperialism, and sees this as far more important than the collapse of
the Soviet Union and its bloc. But he fails to elaborate fully on the relationship
between the weaknesses of the centralized and statist 'model' of Soviet socialism,
and of the national liberation movements that it backed. Those movements
had critical internal weaknesses, related in part to their adoption of the
democratic centralist model, as well as to their absorption of the strategy
of cross-class unity to seize power that the Soviets encouraged.
Even in succeeding, therefore, such movements proved incapable of leading
a thorough and ongoing revolution. Instead, they consolidated power in the
hands of new elites, who were then forced to accommodate and compromise with
imperialism and global capitalism. Such an analysis is necessary to understanding
why the national liberation movements crested and fell back in the face of
an imperialist counter-offensive. It is necessary to help guide future liberation
struggles so that we can do away with imperialism and all forms of oppression
and exploitation once and for all.
Two or three minor weaknesses bear comment. One is his repeated reference
to the New Left and anti-war movements of the 1960s and early 70s as "upper
middle class." Gilbert is perhaps focused on his own privileged class background
here, and that of some of his closest comrades in the leadership of SDS and
the WUO. But the student movement and the anti-war movement, as well as white
fighting forces that engaged in armed struggle against the state in that
period, were in fact far more diverse in terms of class background than he
credits. The Revolutionary Youth Movement strategy articulated by SDS, to
organize white working class youth, community colleges and among GIs, was
a phenomenon that was already going on by self-organization before they proposed
it. As a working class young person from an immigrant trade union family
who joined SDS at a less-privileged public college, I can attest to the fact
that there were many working class kids in SDS. This was also true in the
broader youth movement and anti-war, civil rights and other struggles of
the time. The extent to which GIs began turning the guns around, for example,
was a key factor in ending the draft and the war. Kids in high schools across
NY and many other cities were intensely active and self-organized.
In addition, David Gilbert's treatment of environmental issues is one
of the shortest and least thorough sections of the book, and there is no
mention of animal rights and earth defense actions such as those of ALF and
ELF activists. An analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of such recent
movement, especially in regards to blindness to issues of racism and white
supremacy, would be a worthy addition to this book. A political prisoner
of David's stature, with a long history in armed clandestine opposition to
the US state, could offer important insights on this issue. Perhaps all this,
like the avoidance of anarchism, simply reflects the way in which David has
been cut off by the state from some struggles that have gone on since his
incarceration.
These struggles and criticisms are not meant to detract from the great
contributions David has made and is making to revolutionary struggle. I recommend
this book wholeheartedly, as a valuable and living addition to the library
of anyone concerned with resisting genocide, ending the empire, and winning
human liberation and a sustainable future.
This review appeared in the new Fall 2004
issue of "Turning the Tide: Journal of Anti-Racist Action, Research &
Education", Volume 17 Number 3. Subscribe now to Turning the Tide: Journal
of Anti-Racist Action, Research & Education: Anti-Racist Action/People
Against Racist Terror PO Box 1055 Culver City CA 90232; tel: 310-495-0299;
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