Published in 1972, “Blood In My Eye” is a collection of writings by George Jackson, a political prisoner and a Black freedom fighter. He finished the writings shortly before prison guards murdered him in August 1971. George had been convicted over a decade prior at age 18 — taking $70 from a gas station resulted in a conviction with an indeterminate sentence – one year to life.
While California kept him imprisoned, he read extensively, learning history and economics, discovering Marx, Lenin, Mao, Engels, Trotsky, and developing a strong material analysis and solidarity lens that he shared with his comrades incarcerated alongside him.
Blood in My Eye considers more broadly questions of armed struggle, communism, and Black revolutionary thought, or put simply “it is a book about taking the revolution that George worked and died for inside prison out into society at large.”
“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution. Pass on the torch. Join us, give up your life for the people.”
George Jackson recognized his position as a member of the lumpenproletariat, and remained uncompromising in his approach to a revolutionary future; his view of the world from within the carceral system illuminated the depth of racism in the U.S., and its overlap with capitalist exploitation.
Behind bars he organized sit-ins against segregated cafeterias and taught martial arts to other inmates to fight back against the ever-present, abusive prison guards. He worked with the Oakland chapter of the Black Panthers to recruit members that were incarcerated, and he often highlighted the political consciousness of his comrades that were behind bars.
His work at organizing prisoners across race gained the attention of prison guards, wardens, and the FBI. The state falsely accused him (along with Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette), collectively known as the “Soledad Brothers,” of murdering a guard in retaliation to that guard’s murder of three Black people that were incarcerated (W. L. Nolen, Cleveland Edwards and Alvin Miller) at Soledad Prison in January 1970.
His younger brother, Jonathan Jackson, a high school student in Pasadena, staged a raid on the Marin County courthouse with a satchelful of handguns, an assault rifle, and a shotgun hidden under his coat, all registered to Angela Davis. Educated into a political revolutionary by George, Jonathan invaded the court during a hearing for three Black San Quentin inmates, not including his brother, and handed them weapons. As he left with the inmates and five hostages, including the judge, Jonathan demanded that the Soledad Brothers be released within thirty minutes. In the shootout that ensued, Jonathan was gunned down. Of Jonathan, George wrote, “He was free for a while. I guess that’s more than most of us can expect.” The state murdered Jonathan on August 7, 1970 at the Marin County Courthouse. He was 17. The sole accomplice that survived, Ruchell Magee, was imprisoned for over 50 years (released in July 2023); a manhunt for Angela Davis began, she was tried and ultimately found not guilty; the Weathermen (a militant leftist organization of students) bombed the courthouse in October 1970 in retaliation for the murders of Jonathan Jackson and his comrades.
His first publication, Soledad Brother, compiles letters he wrote between 1964 and 1970, most of which he spent in the most stringent forms of solitary confinement. George dedicated Soledad Brother to Jonathan, and many letters between them can be found within Blood in My Eye, as well as correspondence with Angela Davis.
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Fascism
An excerpt from Blood in My Eye by George Jackson
1971
Fascism
Its most advanced form is here in Amerika.
Comrade John,
I’ve just finished rereading Angela’s analysis of fascism (she’s a brilliant, “big,” beautiful revolutionary woman — ain’t she!!). I’ve studied your letters on the subject carefully. It could be productive for the three of us to get together at once and subject the whole question to a detailed historical analysis. There is some difference of opinion and interpreta- tion of history between us, but basically I think we are brought together on the principal points by the fact that the three of us could not meet without probably causing World War III.
Give her my deepest and warmest love and ask her to review these comments. This is not all that I will have to say on the subject. I’ll constantly return to myself and reexamine. I expect I will have to carry this on for another couple of hundred pages. We’ll deal with the questions as they come up, but for now this should provoke both of you to push me on to a greater effort.
The basis of Angela’s analysis is tied into several old left notions that are at least open to some question now. It is my view that out of the economic crisis of the last great depression fascism-corporativism did indeed emerge, develop and consolidate itself into its most advanced form here in Amerika. In the process, socialist consciousness suffered some very severe setbacks. Unlike Angela, I do not believe that this realization leads to a defeatist view of history. An understanding of the reality of our situation is essential to the success of future revolutionizing activity. To contend that corporativism has emerged and advanced is not to say that it has triumphed. We are not defeated. Pure fascism, absolute totalitarianism, is not possible.
Hierarchy has had six thousand years of trial. It will never succeed for long in any form. Fascism and its historical significance is the point of my whole philosophy on politics and its extension, war. My opinion is that we are at the historical climax (the flash point) of the totalitarian period. The analysis in depth that the subject deserves has yet to be done. Important as they are, both Wilhelm Reich’s and Franz Neumann’s works on the subject are limited. Reich tends to be over analytical to the point of idealism. I don’t think Neumann truly sensed the importance of the antisocialist movement. Behemoth is too narrowly based on the experience of German National Socialism. So there is so much to be done on the subject and time is running out. If I am correct, we will soon be forced into the same fight that the old left avoided.
6/20/71
It is not defeatist to acknowledge that we have lost a battle. How else can we “regroup” and even think of carrying on the fight. At the center of revolution is realism. To call one or two or a dozen setbacks defeat is to overlook the ebbing and flowing process of revolution, coming closer to our calculations and then receding, but never standing still. If a thing isn’t building, it must be decaying. As one force emerges, the opposite force must yield; as one advances, the other must retreat. There is a very significant difference between retreat and defeat. I am not saying that our parents were defeated when I contend that fascist-corporativism emerged and advanced in the U.S. At the same time it was making its advance, it caused, by its very nature, an advance in world-wide socialist consciousness: “When U.S. capitalism reached the stage of imperialism, the Western great powers had already divided among themselves almost all the important markets in the world. At the end of World War II when the other imperialist powers had been weakened, the U.S. became the most powerful and richest imperialist power. Meanwhile, the world situation was no longer the same: the balance of forces between imperialism and the socialist camps had fundamentally changed; imperialism no longer ruled over the world, nor did it play a decisive role in the development of the world situation” (Vo Nguyen Giap).
In my analysis, I’m simply taking into account the fact that the forces of reaction and counterrevolution were allowed to localize themselves and radiate their energy here in the U.S. The process has created the economic, political and cultural vortex of capitalism’s last reform. My views correspond with those of all the Third World revolutionaries. And nate in the seizure of state power. Our real purpose is to redeem not merely ourselves but the whole nation and the whole community of nations from colonial-community economic repression.
The U.S. has established itself as the mortal enemy of all people’s government, all scientific-socialist mobilization of consciousness everywhere on the globe, all anti-imperialist activity on earth. The history of this country in the last fifty years and more, the very nature of all its fundamental elements, and its economic, social, political and military mobilization distinguish it as the prototype of the international fascist counterrevolution. The U.S. is the Korean problem, the Vietnamese problem, the problem in the Congo, Angola, Mozambique, the Middle East. It’s the grease in the British and Latin Amerikan guns that operate against the masses of common people.
6/21/71
The nature of fascism, its characteristics and properties have been in dispute ever since it was first identified as a distinct phenomenon growing out of Italy’s state-supported and developed industries in 1922. Whole libraries have been written around the subject. There have been a hundred “party lines” on just exactly what fascism is. But both Marxists and non-Marxists agree on at least two of its general factors: its capitalist orientation and its anti-labor, anti-class nature. These two factors almost by themselves identify the U.S. as a fascist-corporative state.
An exact definition of fascism concerns me because it will help us identify our enemy and isolate the targets of revolution. Further, it should help us to understand the workings of the enemy’s methodology. Settling this question of whether or not a mature fascism has developed will finally clear away some of the fog in our liberation efforts. This will help us to broaden the effort. We will not succeed until we fully accept the fact that the enemy is aware, determined, disguised, totalitarian, and mercilessly counterrevolutionary. To fight effectively, we must be aware of the fact that the enemy has consolidated through reformist machination the greatest community of self-interest that has ever existed. Our insistence on military action, defensive and retaliatory, has nothing to do with romanticism or precipitous idealistic fervor. We want to be effective. We want to live. Our history teaches us that the successful liberation struggles require an armed people, a whole people, actively participating in the struggle for their liberty!
The final definition of fascism is still open, simply because it is still a developing movement. We have already discussed the defects of trying to analyze a movement outside of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only a discolored glimpse of a dead past.
No one will fully comprehend the historical implications and strategy of fascist corporativism except the true fascist manipulator or the researcher who is able to slash through the smoke screens and disguises the fascists set up. Fascism was the product of class struggle. It is an obvious extension of capitalism, a higher form of the old struggle — capitalism versus socialism. I think our failure to clearly isolate and define it may have something to do with our insistence on a full definition — in other words, looking for exactly identical symptoms from nation to nation. We have been consistently misled by fascism’s nationalistic trappings.
We have failed to understand its basically international character. In fact, it has followed international socialism all around the globe. One of the most definite characteristics of fascism is its international quality.
6/22/71
The trends toward monopoly capital began effectively just after the close of the Civil War in Amerika. Prior to its emergence, bourgeois democratic rule could be said to have been the predominant political force inside Amerikan society. As monopoly capital matured, the role of the old bourgeois democracy faded in process. As monopoly capital forced out the small dispersed factory setup, the new corporativism assumed political supremacy. Monopoly capital can in no way be interpreted as an extension of old bourgeois democracy. The forces of monopoly capital swept across the Western world in the first half of this century. But they did not exist alone. Their opposite force was also at work, i.e., “international socialism” — Lenin’s and Fanon’s — national wars of liberation guided not by the national bourgeois but by the people, the ordinary working-class people.
At its core, fascism is an economic rearrangement. It is international capitalism’s response to the challenge of international scientific socialism. It developed from nation to nation out of differing levels of traditionalist capitalism’s dilapidation. The common feature of all instances of fascism is the opposition of a weak socialist revolution. When the fascist arrangement begins to emerge in any of the independent nation-states, it does so by default! It is simply an arrangement of an established capitalist economy, an attempt to renew, perpetuate and legitimize that economy’s rulers by circumflexing and weighing down, diffusing a revolutionary consciousness pushing from below. Fascism must be seen as an episodically logical stage in the socio-economic development of capitalism in a state of crisis. It is the result of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and miscarried — a consciousness that was compromised. “When revolution fails . . . it’s the fault of the vanguard parties.”
It is clear that class struggle is an ingredient of fascism.
It follows that where fascism emerges and develops, the anti-capitalist forces were weaker than the traditionalist forces. This weakness will become even more pronounced as fascism develops! The ultimate aim of fascism is the complete destruction of all revolutionary consciousness.
6/23/71
Our purpose here is to understand the essence of this living, moving thing so that we will understand how to move against it.
This observer is convinced that fascism not only exists in the U.S.A. but has risen out of the ruins of a once eroded and dying capitalism, phoenix-like, to its most advanced and logical arrangement.
One has to understand that the fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has programmed into its very nature a massive, complex and automatic defense mechanism for all our old methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of people. The essence of a U.S.A. totalitarian socio-political capitalism is concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. Then the debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle based on the development of an armed revolutionary culture that will triumph.
On May 14, 1787, the Constitutional Convention with George Washington presiding officer, the work of framing the new nation’s constitution proceeded with fifty-five persons and only two were not employers!!!
There have been many booms and busts in the history of capitalism in this nation and across the Western Hemisphere since its formation. The accepted method of pulling the stricken economy out of its stupor has always been to expand. It was pretty clear from the outset that the surplus value factor eventually leads to a point in the business cycle when the existing implementation of the productive factors makes it impossible for the larger factor of production (labor) to buy back the “fruits of its labor.” This leads to what has been erroneously termed “overproduction.” It is, in fact, underconsumption. The remedy has always been to expand, to search out new markets and new sources of cheaper raw materials to recharge the economy (the imperialist syndrome).
Conflicts of interests develop, of course, between the various Western nations and eventually lead to competition for these markets. The result is always an ever-increasing international centralization of the various capitalists’ elites, world-wide cartels: International Telegraphic Unions (now International Tele-communications Union), universal postal union, transportation, agricultural, and scientific syndicates. Before World War I there were forty-five or fifty such international syndicates, not counting the purely business cartels. The international quality of capitalism is not happenstance.
It is clearly in the interests of the ruling class to expand and unite. I am one Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Fanonist who does not completely accept the idea that the old capitalist competitive wars for colonial markets were actually willed by the various rulers of each nation, even though such wars stimulated their local economies and made it possible to promote nationalism among the lower classes. War taken to the point of diminishing returns weakens rather than strengthens the participants, and if the rulers of these nations were anything at all they were good businessmen. Expansion, then, which often led unavoidably to war, was the traditional recourse in the solving of problems created by a vacuous, uncontrollable system, which never considered any changes in its arrangement, its essential dynamics, until it came under a very real, directly threatening challenge from below to its very existence. Fascism in its early stages is a rearrangement of capitalist implementation in response to a sharpening, threatening, but weaker egalitarian socialist consciousness.
In regional or national economic crisis the traditional remedies also include measures which stop just short of massive expansion on the international level. Traditional controls short of expansion and war have always existed in the form of government intervention, tariffs, public expenditure, government export subsidy and limited control of the capital market and import licenses, and monopolies have always used government to help direct investment.