George Jackson

Originally published: New York: Random House, 1972.

Blood in My Eye

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

Revolution within a modern industrial capitalist society can only mean the overthrow of all existing property relations and the destruction of all institutions that directly or indirectly support existing property relations. It must include the total suppression of all classes and individuals who endorse the present state of property relations or who stand to gain from it. Anything less than this is reform.

If the proponents of revolution cannot learn to distinguish and translate the theoretical into the practical, if they continue to debate just how to call up and harness the conscious motive forces of revolution, the revolutionary ideal will be the loser– it will be rejected. 

The fascists have deliberately manufactured a false sense of security by various stratagems. They will never permit conditions to go out of their control as long as “bread and circuses” appease. We clearly cannot dodge our responsibilities by giving credence to slogans built around “conditions.” Conditions will never be altogether right for a broadly based revolutionary war unless the fascists are stricken by an uncharacteristic fit of total madness. Should we wait for something that is not likely to occur at least for decades? The conditions that are not present must be manufactured.

Comrades ask me sometimes what can we do against “all these pigs.” I state it simply—we put them to death.

I recall you remarking that in an urban guerrilla situation the military proper must be hidden, separate from the political front, since unlike a classical Mao-Giap countryside struggle where the enemy’s principal forces are 30 miles down the road, with us the enemy is all around, within a few moments of strike.

When any election is held it will fortify rather than destroy the credibility of the power brokers. When we participate in this election to win, instead of disrupt, we’re lending to its credibility, and destroying our own. 

No tactic can be ignored or discounted in such a battle. Power responds to all threats. The response is repression. If the threat is a small one, the fascist tactic is to laugh it off, ignore it, isolate it with its defense mechanism—media. The greater the threat the greater the corresponding violence from power.

A people can never be so repressed that they can’t strike back in some way.

But this has yet to be proved to my satisfaction since I know that a bomb is a bomb is a bomb; it twists steel, shatters concrete and dismembers men everywhere else in the world. Why not those made in Amerika? A bullet fired from an assault rifle in the hands of a Vietnamese liberation fighter will kill a pig in Vietnam. Why won’t it kill a pig in the place where pigs are made?

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