June 11, 2013: Connection, Resistance, Celebration

june11.org

This year, we celebrated the third annual international day of solidarity with Marie Mason, Eric McDavid, and long-term anarchist prisoners….We’ve noted with pleasure how comrades from diverse locales have appropriated the call for solidarity, by:

Continuing to provide direct support to Marie, Eric, and other prisoners via letter-writing and fundraising.

Organizing, with increasing frequency, events like conversations, dinners and debates. These strengthen local struggles and better connects them to companions who have been kidnapped by the state to be held in cells.

Further elaborating the direct struggle against the structures of domination, not only by continuing to carry out actions but by concretely demonstrating new connections in the web of power (particularly by acting against surprising targets) that imprisons our friends, comrades and loved ones.

Building new networks against repression and imprisonment, and connecting via solidarity seemingly disconnected prisoners.

In the spirit of this last point, we would like to thank everyone who organized events and carried out actions that made it clear that Marie and Eric are not the only prisoners facing repression, but are instead part of a worldwide movement. In particular, local organizers linked June 11 to these other prisoners and comrades: Oso Blanco, Walter Bond, Chilean anarchists in both the old and new cases, grand jury resisters in the USA, Richard Williams (combatant who died in a US prison in 2005), those facing the campaign of anti-anarchist state violence in Greece, the Cleveland 4, the Tinley Park 5, along with others we have overlooked. It is important that long-term anarchist prisoners receive specific solidarity, since they are particularly susceptible to being lost in the oblivion of the state’s dungeons and communications management units. However, it is also clear that they must not be treated in isolation from others struggling against repression.

We are also heartened that so many of the events linked Marie and Eric’s experiences to ongoing struggles in defense of the earth and animals. Multiple cities organized solidarity events that were also in explicit opposition to the Tar Sands pipelines, while others linked the organizing to action against animal exploitation and prisons. Many of the solidarity dinners were vegan, echoing the conscious choice of both Marie and Eric to maintain their vegan diets, despite the challenges of doing so in prison.

The fight for Marie and Eric’s freedom is not limited to a single day per year, but is present whenever we resist prison-society and the forces of domination. They, and all of us, will be a little closer to freedom if the hunger strikers up and down the West Coast of the USA succeed at challenging the power of the prison system. We will all be safer if the repressive drive of the grand juries in NYC and the Pacific Northwest is brought to a halt, and if the Mapuche indictees are acquitted in Chile.

Jock Palfreeman, a long-term anarchist prisoner in Bulgaria, was just denied the transfer to Australia that he has been fighting for, and has requested support and pressure against the prison officials. Further, Krow, arrested on June 11 in an eco-action against mining in the Penokee mountains of Wisconsin, urgently needs support. We call for solidarity with everyone facing repression in these situations. The happy news of Kostas Sakkas’ recent release from jail, secured by his hunger strike alongside intense collective struggle, confirms the importance of revolutionary solidarity. Regardless of whether our actions successfully return our comrades to the streets, the practice of solidarity always leaves us stronger.