Bulldozer: 15 years and more

[David]

Bulldozer: 15 years and more
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| | | | |||||| PRISON NEWS SERVICE
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A Bulldozer Publication

This is a selected posting from Issue #49, January-February 1995.
Out February the 3rd.

Fifteen years of Bulldozer and more:

The personal, the political, and a few of the connections*

Fifteen years ago, in February 1980, the Bulldozer collective was formed when
4 or 5 activists from various places in southern Ontario met up in Toronto
and decided that we should start working together on prison-related issues
since we had individually begun to do so. We were so inspired by the letters
we were receiving from prisoners that we decided that should share them more
widely, that summer we put out the first issue of a newsletter called
Bulldozer - the only vehicle for prison reform.

Much has changed since that time - and generally for the worst. Prison
populations have increased in Canada by over 50 per cent, and by much more
than that in the U.S. Conditions have deteriorated due to overcrowding and
program-slashing. Control Units have proliferated and sentences have gotten
longer. More than ever, prisons seem to be an inevitable part of the lives of
the poor and marginal. Their role in disrupting and containing the colonized
peoples - Native, New Afrikan, and Latino - is as effective and disguised as
ever.

With only a few exceptions - i.e. the closing of the Lexington Control Unit
for women - the struggle against prisons, inside or out, has been weak and
ineffective. Only a few states like New Jersey have any connection with the
earlier prison struggles. The prison struggle in Canada which was strong in
the late '70s and early '80s met with a combination of reform and repression
that killed whatever energy was left. Resistance in the Washington state
system which represented one of the final thrusts of the prisoners' movement
that reached back to the days of George Jackson was eventually disrupted by
forced transfers and overt brutality. Since then conscious and active
prisoners have generally found themselves isolated, either deliberately so in
Control Units, or simply because the majority of prisoners prefer to remain
asleep. Sadly enough, there are many prisoners who have been on our mailing
list since the '80s.

On the outside, a small number of very dedicated individuals and groups have
kept going, but there has been no movement to speak of until very recently.
Prisoner-support work has not been that popular with the left, nor with
social activists in general, and as in most movements out here, a year or so
seems to satisfy most people's interest in doing the work. In spite of the
hard work on campaigns to free particular POWs, such as Leonard Peltier, most
of them remain in prison, a constant reminder of our weakness.

But Bulldozer has not survived fifteen years by dwelling on the negative, and
I don't intend to. Recently, there have been positive developments on both
sides of the border which suggest that we are able to take some political
initiative in the crime and punishment debate. The meeting in Philadelphia in
December, 1994, in which anti-prison activists from across the U.S. (and
Toronto) came together to set up the Control Unit Monitoring Project (CUMP)
is certainly a significant step.

CUMP is a major political initiative and will be a test as to whether or not
a movement can be built on the outside, working with prisoners, to close down
Control Units. The development of this campaign requires a political
strategy. As one of the longest standing collectives involved in anti-prison
work, Bulldozer has a certain responsibility to assist in this development.
Yet we are hampered because we are based in Toronto, and after more than
fifteen years involvement with the American left, there is still much that is
totally mystifying about radical politics in the U.S.; the enormous division
between the various races is particularly perplexing. One of the ways in
which we've maintained credibility over the years is because we don't talk
about what we don't know. We hesitate to make suggestions as to what outside
activists in the U.S. should be doing to advance the struggle, beyond very
general principles, because the political realities in the two countries are
very different.

With this in mind, I would like to use this article as the beginning of an
irregular series that would articulate some of the politics we've developed
over the years. It is not intended as a "What is to be Done" but more where
we've come from and what we've seen work. PNS does reflect our politics, but
they have been more implicit than explicit. We've never written long essays
telling prisoners what they should think. Rather, we've tried to provide a
forum in which prisoners, individually and collectively, could articulate and
develop their politics. We were always more interested in what we could
learn, rather than what we could teach. If individual prisoners could learn
from us, so much the better, but that would come from ongoing dialogue and
communication. The political direction of the paper would be determined by
prisoners, even if the decision as to what would or would not be printed was
always ours.

Counter cultural politics

Bulldozer's politics are rooted in the counter-culture, going back to a
student house begun in the fall of 1971 in Kitchener, Ont. which developed
into one of the first anarchist collectives in Canada, with a heavy emphasis
on radical psychology and existential philosophy (and sex and drugs and rock
and roll.) All through the '70s, the collective tried to maintain a political
orientation to counter cultural politics, even as the individualism that was
glorified in these movements allowed for the reassertion of race, class and
gender privilege, and a reintegration into business-as-usual for many former
radicals and activists. In 1979, we moved to the country, and set up a
communal dirt-farm with the expectation that it would be a viable rural
community from which we could maintain a political practice.

The first issue of Open Road, a kick-ass, and very well produced, anarchist
news-journal came out of Vancouver in August of 1976, transforming radical
politics in Canada. Many of the articles in that first issue - Leonard
Peltier's impending extradition to the U.S., George Jackson Brigade actions,
an interview with Martin Soastre, a Puerto Rican anarchist and former POW,
coverage of Native and prisoners' struggles - would not look out of place in
the PNS today. My own sense of political possibilities and necessities were
opened up by the year (1977) which I spent working with Open Road in
Vancouver. But there was little opportunity to put them into practice when I
returned to Ontario. I became increasingly dissatisfied with the
self-indulgence of the counter culture and the anarchist-purism that
celebrated it. I missed the more activist-oriented politics of the Vancouver
scene but moved to the country anyway to follow the politics of collectivity
through to the end.

The farm floundered right from the beginning due to a lazy-faire attitude and
middle class arrogance. With self-expression and "do-your-own-thing" as the
highest values, most communal members were unable to respond to the realities
of a situation determined by an unrelenting hostile climate, and the cycle of
the seasons. Having grown up poor and living-in-the-country, it didn't seem
to be such a big deal to be back, poor, and living-in-the-country. I left
totally disillusioned at the end of 1981, moved to Toronto permanently, cut
my hair, and got a full-time job shortly after. I had started to write to
prisoners and the first issue of Bulldozer came out while I was still living
there. I was keen to continue with the work.

Open Road motivated the creation of a more action-orientated, militant
politic in Vancouver such as the Anarchist Party of Canada (Groucho-Marxist)
which carried out a series of "pieings" - literally throwing a pie in the
face of a politician or celebrity, with Eldridge Cleaver being the most
famous "hit" - in order to make a political point. As simple as this may
sound, it brought about political and personal transformations from planning
and carrying out the actions to dealing with the consequences -
confrontations with reactionaries and authorities. The more serious people in
the scene started to do support work for the prisoners in the old B.C. Pen
whose struggles eventually resulted in its closure. From then on, prisons
have been an essential part of the work taken on by our circles.

Out of this came Direct Action, an armed group which in 1982 blew-up an
electrical substation on Vancouver Island ($5 million in damages) and a
Litton Industries factory north of Toronto that built components for the
Cruise Missile ($10 million in damages and several injuries). Some of the
same people were also involved in the Wimmin's Fire Brigade firebombing of
three video stories specializing in violent porn. They were arrested in
January, 1983, immediately putting us into doing support work. In June of
1983 Bulldozer was raided and threatened with a charge of Seditious Libel
(calling for the armed overthrow of the state) for the distribution of
support-leaflets we were putting out. A mid-wife, living with us at the time,
was arrested and charged with "performing an abortion" in an attempt to get
information from her about our links to Direct Action. After several thousand
dollars in legal fees, and a year of high-stress, all the serious charges
were dropped in connection to the raid. After losing several legal challenges
over the legality of evidence, the Vancouver Five, as they had come to be
called, pled guilty to several charges related to the actions.

Bulldozer was being published irregularly during this time. The 8th and final
issue came out in 1985. I was personally and politically exhausted, and
Bulldozer as a political project disappeared for two years. Fortunately, a
very active group of young high school students in Ottawa had been influenced
by the politics put out around the trials of the Vancouver Five. Even as our
own political motivation had disappeared in despair, they took the ideas and
started working with them, leading to the appearance of Reality Now! an
anarchist zine that was very influential. Eventually, their enthusiasm helped
to regenerate my own politics. After two years of inactivity the tedium of a
comfortable working class life was becoming all too apparent. When Bill Dunne
needed an outsider to help him with The Marionette, a prisoners' newsletter
he was doing from Marion, I rejoined the struggle. PNS then developed out of
The Marionette.

Social history

This provides a brief history of Bulldozer, though it is more of a social
than a political history. I want to be clear that Bulldozer developed out of
the alternative or cultural politics - i.e. the punks, and hippies, purist
anarchism, women, lesbians and gays, etc. - which has been the primary means
by which white youth have radicalized over the past few decades. It is all
too easy, and certainly necessary, to critique these cultural movements.
Their general failure to deal adequately with issues of race and class does
make them little more than "white rights" groups as Lorenzo Kom'boa Erwin
puts it. The social alienation that originally motivates many white youth
into becoming part of these cultural or marginal movements get channeled into
an accommodation with race and class privilege. Intense self-absorption,
often combined with heavy drug and/or alcohol use, leads them to think that
their subjective rebellion has some meaning. But modern capitalism cares
little what anyone actually thinks, so long as one produces, or if
unemployed, accepts being economically marginal.

The women's movement is, or at least was, different in that it did pose a
real threat to the existing patriarchical structures of this society. This
can be measured by the severity of the ideological counter-attack waged
against it, even if it was discovered that the position of women in society
could be changed without endangering the interests of those who get the
goods. Awareness of their own misery had lead many women individually and
collectively to develop a radical analysis of their social position. This
self-awareness became a vulnerability as self-help, New Age therapies - often
looted from Native societies in a continuation of the kolonial kleptomania
that has characterized white society - were used to help women (and men) to
fit into the existing system. Political consciousness was increasingly seen
as being part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. The necessary
struggle to feel good about oneself - self-esteem - allowed for an acceptance
of class and racial privilege.

For all that, though, we haven't turned our backs on the alternative
movements. The fundamental oppression and super-exploitation of, and violence
towards, women remains. And mainstream culture is a death culture, not much
wonder that so many young people, working class and middle class, try to find
some life outside of it in one movement or another. Going way back into the
early '70s where we were more political than the rest of the hippies, and
more hippy-like than the other politicos, we've tried to develop what could
be termed the political wing of the alternative movements. Through time, our
politics chnaged thanks to people such as Kuwasi Balagoon and the local
Leonard Peltier Defense Group - with whom we went through some real hard
times from '83 to '85 - as we struggled to come to terms with the
colonialism, genocide and slavery upon which North Amerikan society is based.
I will take up this topic in some other article, but I wish to return to the
politics of the alternative movements.

The original insight that the "personal is political" was truly radical in
that it went to the root (radical means going to the roots) of social
existence, our own individual lives. So great was the contradiction between
the myth of social happiness, and the misery found in most people's lives
once they looked, that it energized the various social movements from the
'60s on. The slogan originally meant that there is a social context to our
personal lives, and that a serious examination of who we are would lead us to
understand the political context within which we lived. But its subversive
impact has been smothered by reducing the political to the personal, as
though nothing mattered politically except for one's personal life and a few
close friends.

Yet it remains that coming to understand who we are is a necessary first step
towards participating in an authentic liberatory process. Part of the impact
of PNS itself is because it speaks directly to prisoners' lived-experience,
rather than simply offering an intellectual explanation of political reality.
The paper helps those who are struggling to know themselves in spite of
living in a cage feel strong - and that's a victory. Coming from what could
be called a "secular spirituality", we share with traditional Natives, New
Afrikans and Muslims amongst others, the sense that an individual's life is a
"struggle" in and off itself; that it is our task as humans to unravel the
mysteries of our own existence, to determine the truth within it, and to find
the proper direction. Politics come back into it since any honest examination
should lead to a clear understanding that this society is based on a complex
blend of race, class and sex. Many whites, and others as well, unfortunately
back off from these political implications.

The critical importance of understanding the connections between politics and
one's personal experience became much more vivid for me when I "remembered"
five years ago that I had been subjected to severe and frequent sexual abuse
as a child. Suddenly my own life made a lot more sense to me. I had
discovered the key to my private mythology. The rage which I had learned to
channel into my political work became understandable. It made sense to me why
I was drawn by the plight of the prisoner. I had spent much of my younger
days isolated, brutalized, surrounded by those much more powerful than I who
were out to do me harm, used by bigger and stronger boys. An image that had
haunted me for years of a prisoner, beaten down, forlorn and forgotten,
huddled in a corner of a cell, had come straight from my own life,
figuratively if not literally. I had been driven by a vow - as unconscious as
it must have been - to not stand by while others were being abused.

There is much that we've learned over the past few years about abuse and
healing that have political implications, particularly for prisoners since
surely prison is nothing if not a system of institutionalized abuse. I will
take this theme up more fully another day. But for now, I will say that as we
became more aware of issues around abuse, it made sense to discover that at
least half of the activists we knew were sexually and/or physical abused as
children. We had lived the lies and hypocrisy of the family, religion and
society. Our opposition to all three was not merely some intellectual
construct, nor mere political fashion but was born of bitter experience. I
did not need the suffering of others - women, Native people, Afrikans,
prisoners or whoever - to motivate me politically. I had resisted long before
I even knew there was a struggle. Like many of my prisoner-friends surviving
long years of isolation and brutality, something within me refused to be
broken.

I was in total mental and emotional anguish until well into my twenties, but
for whatever unknown reasons, I was able to focus my rage on the
corporate-state, and its bullies and bosses. Political activity became a
means of eventual resolution. Slowly, but surely, I connected with other
misfits, malcontents and losers. The counter culture gave us a certain space
to be ourselves. We might still be totally alienated from society, barely
able to function day-to-day, heavy drug use helping to keep the pain at bay,
yet we were no longer alone. And we would fight back.

In a psychologized society such as ours, political activity will often be
shaped by unresolved personal problems. We are driven by our demons. But
working through these problems need not mean the end of the political
activism that was energized by the inner conflicts. It should, in fact, mean
that we target the enemy ever more precisely. The abuse must stop! We can
stop being abusive. We can resist the abuse we're suffering. But abuse is not
simply due to personal failure or the lack of appropriate therapy or bad
genes but totally integral to a homophobic society that uses class, race and
sex to determine who gets what. This is where political will comes in. As
long as abuse continues, then we must fight against it even if, or especially
if, our own pain and suffering has been eased. *

Jim Campbell


Postscript

I have used Bulldozer as a personal identification in the past, and the
article above reflects my personal history and opinions, and have played the
main editorial role since the beginning. But Bulldozer can't simply be
reduced to me personally. There are several people who currently help shape
Prison News Service and their efforts are much appreciated. I do want to
acknowledge some of the others who have made significant contributions to
Bulldozer in the past.

Sunday Harrison has been around Bulldozer more or less since the beginning,
especially including the raid and its aftermath. Her technical skills and
creativity have helped give PNS a much more professional look than it would
otherwise have had. We have very much developed our ideas together - even if
on any particular detail we are as apt to disagree as agree.

Bill Dunne, the editor and main writer for the now defunct The Marionette
also was a major influence on my thinking. Our years of exchanging letters
certainly tightened up many of my arguments. Without him, it is unlikely that
PNS would exist.

After the raid in 1983, our support came from our Native comrades and from
women working at a Lesbian print shop. Though I barely knew most of these
women, they immediately came through with crucial assistance. It is many
years later, but I don't forget those who were there when help was needed.
The lesbian community has also done the basic work on understanding sexual
abuse and how it affects those who survive it. I would not have been able to
write the above if it were not for the personal support and political
stimulation and information that came from lesbian friends. We are interested
in connecting with anyone else who is working to integrate surivor issues
with a radical political analysis.

Jim C.



E-mail sage!pns@noc.tor.hookup.net

Prison News Service is a 20-page tabloid, written mainly by prisoners
with news and analysis from the prisons of United States and Canada.

Subscriptions to Prison News Service are $10.00/6 issues (more is you can,
less if you can't, nobody is ever refused a sub for lack of money.), Send a
dollar or two for a sample. Write:

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Toronto, Ont
Canada M5W 1W4

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