Unionisation and the Black Radical Tradition in Contemporary US In-prison Social Movements

• In Event: Political Participation

Abstract

In 2016 and 2018 in-prison social movements Free Alabama Movement and Jailhouse Lawyers Speak organized the only national prison strikes in US history. Support for these movements came from the Incarcerated Workers Organising Committee (IWOC), a subsidiary of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), that had been chartered with the mass unionisation of incarcerated people as its explicit goal. Ultimately, tensions arose between “inside” movements (currently incarcerated organizers) and the IWW/IWOC (activists working outside the prison) around whether anti-carceral struggle they were engaged in was best understood in terms of a “labor struggle”, best pursued through the organisational form of a union. Extensive interviews with incarcerated movement leadership, and outside supporters, reveal that these tensions turned on specific differences between the role of work in the carceral political economy, as opposed to the role of waged work on the “outside”, the role of race in critical analysis, and the role of tradition in structuring the orientations of the contending movements. The inside-prison movements inhabit a Black radical tradition, and developed an analysis akin to scholars of racial capitalism, in which race and political economy were co-foundational. This differed from the labor-as-master-category analysis which underwrote the push toward unionisation from IWOC on the outside. This race-blind economistic orientation threatened to subsume the Black radical analysis and praxis within a narrow Marxian view, displace “inside” movement leadership, occlude issues constitutive of their abolitionist politics, and limit their capacity to expand membership, and was rejected on these bases.

Author

• Dion Nania, New School for Social Research