February: Palestine

This curriculum is for readers interested in learning more about Palestinian Liberation. Readings cover both current and historical events of Israeli Occupation and Palestinian resistance.Themes include: Decolonization, Apartheid, and Self determination.

Readings:

Discussion Questions:

  1. What is Apartheid? Would you describe Israel as an Apartheid State?

  2. Do you agree with the following poem?
    The Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only,
    but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause
    of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.
    —Ghassan Kanafani

  3. What is the right to self determination? What does self-determination look like for Palestinian People?

  4. Is there a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism?

March: Politicization and Community

Discussion Guide:

The Brother You Choose:

  1. What stories do Conway and Coates tell about experiencing racism and class oppression before having the language for it, or what Conway calls “a Black rage that was undefined” (12)? Do you have similar memories? When and how did you develop a framework for understanding them? 

  2. Coates recalls his father treating him to deal with threats: “police were not the largest threat; ignorance was” (21). What were the lessons of your home that you have carried with you? 

  3. What were the paths to politicization for Conway and Coates? How did the military and imperialism shape them? What were the particular moments they identified as shifts? 

  4. Coates notes that many people knew what they were fighting against, but not what they were fighting for. What are some of the tangible structures the Black Panther Party created to imagine a different world and meet people’s material needs? (see 57-68). Individually or as a group, list the structures you’ve created and how these principles could grow within the shell of the old world into the new one being created.

  5. Coates supported Conway through over four decades inside, through visits with family as well as other forms of inside-out organizing. What are some of the ways Conway built community inside? (see chapter 10). How do these compare to organizing and community building that you know about or are involved in? 

  6. Coates explains that the “violence is manufactured in prisons all over the country. It’s not just an instance where the capitalist system is taking away its surplus labor, where marginal populations are obsolete because manufacturing is now automated. You have something now that’s the foundation of fascism: fear” (114-115). According to this statement, how does he understand the prisons function in society? 

Community as Rebellion:

  1. García Peña writes that she was not “born rebellious” but was “nurtured into rebellion.” What does it look like to be nurtured into rebellion? At what points in your life were you nurtured into rebellion? 

  2. García Peña describes several encounters where colleagues or other academics saw her success as linked to their own failings, in a sort of zero sum game (20-23). How does this sort of lateral violence play out in the prison, where people are conditioned to see one person’s gain as their loss. How does this tie back to her call for “community as rebellion”? 

  3. The book names the ways that “diversity and inclusion” is a framework meant to exclude many through inclusion of a few. “It yields a language of comfort that allows white supremacy to name us in the very process of creating our exclusion,” García Peña writes (28). Later, she points out that “slavery was abolished in the US eighty-nine years after independence. That is what changed–the masters, not the system” (42). Where do you see similar dynamics within the prison? How does focusing on the system, and not the masters, change your organizing?

  4. How do you define community? What is it, and what is it not? Are there ways that community gets used to advance oppression rather than to fight it? 

  5. “To have community, we must commune,” García Peña writes. “That is, we must insist on community as an action, as a verb (50). What does community as action look like to you? 

  6. On page 73, García Peña talks about “accompaniment” as a form of activism– that people cannot be liberated but must liberate themselves through accomplices. This relates to the story her father tells her about finding accomplices (32-33). How have you participated in or witnessed similar forms of accomplice/accompaniment? 

Build Those Collectives:

  1. How does this zine define a collective? What is unique about a collective as opposed to an organization, a community, or an affinity group? 

  2. The authors note that “actually doing the work within the collective can be as difficult as forming the thing in the first place” (6). Identify what aspects your group is doing that are already collective. Where do you think you need to grow or interrogate practices to be more collective? 

  3. “Anti-oppression work is an ongoing struggle.” The authors suggest that collectives must constantly fight to ensure that oppressive tendencies within the collective be addressed without punishment or shame. What examples have you experienced in your own groups? What strategies have you successfully (or unsuccessfully) used to try to combat oppression within the group? 

  4. Brian Dominic begins their essay “What is a collective?” by stressing that collective social organization is not only possible, but already exists within our society. This is called prefiguration or prefigurative politics—modes of organizing and social relations that reflect within the current society the future society being strived for by the group. Revolutionary political prisoner Martin Sostre put it simply: “if we do it right, it will end up right.” What forms of prefigurative politics are you already practicing within your communities or collectives? What areas can you develop further? 

  5. What are the types of collectives that Dominic identifies and how do they differ from one another (15-16)? 

  6. Dominic writes that “while collectives’ internal functions vary from group to group, certain principles are consistent throughout.” What are those consistent principles they identify? 

  7. What does Dominic mean when they write that “while the hierarchical organization seeks to suppress or extinguish ‘insubordination’ in its ranks as ‘efficiently’ as possible, the collective engages in its own crisis management function: a system of exposing the problem and getting it into the open so it can be dealt with rationally?” (18-19). Can you think of examples of each of these approaches you’ve experienced in your life?

April: Revolutionary Love

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”
-Ernesto “Che” Guevara 

“Perhaps that is what love is–the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.”
-Phyllis Rose

Readings:

Discussion Guide:

In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love:

  1. How does James define “Captive Maternals”? (6-7)

  2. James writes that “in order to truly confront repression, we must pursue Revolutionary Love” (4). How does she define or envision “Revolutionary Love”? 

  3. “There is a version of the ‘talented tenth’ in every ethnic and economic group,” James writes (25). What is the history of the “Talented Tenth”? How does James position W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells in respect to it? (16-19). Who are more contemporary “talented tenths” and what is their role in/against liberation struggles? 

  4. Which of the seven lessons in James’ abolitionist notebook resonated most? How does she position the university within/against abolitionist struggles? 

  5. What is the “dominant algorithm for anti-racism” according to James? (44-45). How must we “rewrite” that algorithm? 

  6. What were the conditions through which Black Studies emerged? What was its theory and its practice? (57-67)

  7. What are some of the concrete ways that the Black Panther Party introduced socialism to communities they struggled with? (74-84)

  8. What does the phrase “Black faces in high places” refer to? What examples do the authors give and what examples can you think of to supplement them? (89-100)

  9. What is James’ critique of pragmatism? Who gets to define what is pragmatic and to what end? (179-183)

  10. What does James identify as the limitations of Black feminisms? Why does she propose the Captive Maternal as an alternative and what does it include that Black feminisms do not, in her contention? 

  11. James warns that there is no unified “abolition,” there are abolitionism-s (in the plural). Which does she identify and what sort of different abolitionisms have you encountered? Is it important to “hold a line,” as Denaud asks? (199-214)

  12. What is the concept of the “guerilla intellectual,” borrowing from Walter Rodney? (203)

  13. James describes George Jackson as a Captive Maternal, for the Captive Maternal is “anybody who loves others and the people as a communal mass” (260). How does she use Soledad Brother as evidence of this? How do you define revolutionary love? 

“Marriage and Love”:

  1. What is marriage and what is love, according to Goldman? What is the difference and relationship between the two? 

  2. How is marriage linked to women’s oppression? 

  3. Goldman sarcastically heralds “six million women wage-earners; six million women, who have the equal right with men to be exploited, to be robbed, to go on strike; aye, to starve even . . . Yes, six million wage-workers in every walk of life, from the highest brain work to the most difficult menial labor in the mines and on the railroad tracks; yes, even detectives and policemen. Surely the emancipation is complete” (5). What is her critique of this “emancipation” in the workplace for women? 

  4. How does Goldman describe the home for women? 

  5. In what ways is the institution of marriage similar to capitalism according to Goldman?

  6. What is the relationship between love and freedom? (8)

“Finding Revolutionary Love in a World of Profound Alienation”:

  1. What conditions and context does Asî urge us to consider “love” within? Why is this important?

  2. How does Asî see social media as a potentially useful tool? 

  3. What must be created for true love to exist, according to the author?

  4. How does love combat alienation? What are the forms of alienation the author lists, and what other forms do you think could be added?

  5. How does sexism “take love away from all of us”? (12)

  6. Asî describes marriage as “one of the most important means of oppression against women” (12). How does this argument parallel Goldman’s? 

  7. Love is often portrayed as something shared between two people. How does Asî  complicate this? What aspects of love are communal?

  8. What is the relationship between love and revolution? (15-16)