Life Is Revolution: Jonathan Peter Jackson Jr. On the Family Legacy & the Struggle to Come
On 12 March 2025, Unity of Fields interviewed Jonathan Peter Jackson Jr, an artist, scholar, son of martyr Jonathan Peter Jackson, and nephew of martyr George Lester Jackson. Born eight-and-a-half months after his father was assassinated—at the age of 17—leading the Marin County Courthouse Rebellion, Jonathan spent the first 19 years of his life living underground under an assumed identity. He has a forthcoming memoir, “Notes of a Radical Son,” with Seven Stories Press. You can support and follow his work on his Substack (jonathanpeterjackson.substack.com), his website (jonathanpeterjackson.com) and his Twitter (@MudAndMayo).
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Unity of Fields: Thank you for doing this interview with us. It is such an incredible honor.
Jonathan Peter Jackson Jr: It’s a pleasure to be here!
UoF: George and Jonathan Jackson are like Yahya Sinwar to us, and really their true story has never been told. Fascism is here, and it’s been here since before Trump won; it’s been here since amerika’s inception. Right now the people engaged in anti-imperialist resistance here are facing extreme levels of repression, from liberal reformists and fascists alike. Everything George and Jonathan theorized is more relevant than ever and needs to be applied to our conditions right now. So we’re really excited to get into all of this with you. I thought we could maybe start with you just setting some context for the readers about your life, and your father and George’s lives. Even the people who uphold them the most fiercely and see them as the historical throughline for our struggle today don’t necessarily know the Jacksons’ true history, especially the story of their martyrdom, outside of the state narrative. So whatever you are down to get into, we can start there.
JPJ Jr: I think that the Jackson family has a really unique take on the discourse of fascism because, of course, George set that stage as he was writing about it earlier than 1969-70—he was writing about it earlier, but it was disseminated from him in those years. And as we should know, his general statement, the take-home magnet statement, is fascism is already here. So you know that in 1969 this is being identified by the radical edge of social movement. And then, of course, to pick up on what you said about people not knowing, and I write about this in the ’94 foreword [to Soledad Brother] as well, there are reasons why not only the narrative of the Jackson family isn’t known, and those reasons are many, but actually one of the main ones is that he identified fascism so early as a feature of late 20th-century capitalism. I don’t think there were any other translatable messages for popular discourse, any other Black or Black Radical and other radical voices that were talking about it at the time.
I’m thinking of obviously King, etc. I do actually believe that King was coming close and would’ve gotten there fairly quickly, not just in his later years when he was speaking outright socialism, which is what got him killed, but he probably would’ve come around to using the F-word (as we can sort of shorthand it). So yeah, the long history of the Jackson family, I think I’m going to leave most of that for the memoir material, mostly because it’s such a cool story that I want people to experience it in text. We did a lot of research going all the way back to our origins in southern Louisiana and Virginia. But the narrative that people who are in the struggle and resisting need to know is that George’s formulation as a political prisoner who was kept in prison because he developed an ideology while incarcerated. Much like Malcolm X in that sense, without the religious aspect to it, but that is the reason why every time he came up on his indeterminate sentence, he was effectively rejected by the parole board. And so as his movement grew inside the prison walls and it was a class-based recognition of the incarcerated position, he became more well-known. And as a result, George got into a situation in Soledad where his mentor, a man by the name of W.L. Nolen, was targeted and sniped by a prison guard.
Then, as some of us know, and some of us are right now learning, the case of the Soledad Brothers emerged—a prison guard was found, strangled and thrown over the top tier of the wing. So at that point, George was on trial for his life and became very public. That is when the letters of Soledad Brother began to be collected, and the narrative and the compelling vision of his started gaining momentum as the trial proceeded. Because when you have an indeterminate sentence, you’re effectively up against the death penalty. But there were some tactical complications…
One of the things that a lot of people don’t know, so I’ll pass on something new to people who are more familiar with the story, is that George never wanted to plead not guilty for that killing. And if you really stop to think about the true revolutionary spirit of that, you begin to understand George a little bit better. In this way I hope that can fill in a picture of George for the people. But nonetheless, the trial went on, and as it became apparent that things were maybe going sideways, the liberation of the Civic Center in Marin County, California, happened on August 7th, 1970, which is one of our greatest holidays in Black August. My father was killed during that attempt. That event was seismic in a way that is almost incomprehensible in today’s situation. And as you know, because we were talking about this the other day, one of my mantras is everything is situational.
UoF: The subjective factor is the determining factor, as Mao said, and Dhoruba Bin Wahad has reminded us.
JPJ Jr: I don’t think within the constraints of this format, and I always am very upfront about arguing against the constraints of any media format that I communicate in…I don’t think I can talk about it all. I can’t paint the entire picture of what was going on in 1970 and the aftermath of that event, but I can say that the way in which the event came to be and the events afterward effectively fractured the Black radical movement in this country. Then, of course, as a death blow, George was killed in an escape attempt a year and two weeks later on August 21st, 1971. Obviously, there are a lot of details and important points to talk about, but again, we have a time constraint here. We can fill those pictures out either with more questions or at another time.
But certainly for those who are aware of prison resistance and struggle, Attica came about directly after the death of George Jackson. So I think that’s a good crib noted version of the Jackson significance on the world stage. The only other part I would add is that Soledad Brother caught fire, and it was internationally renowned almost instantly, and I think that had more to do with the time period. But it’s really important to grasp that the breadth of that book pulled in an international movement and in some ways continues to do so. That’s why I find it useful to talk about Soledad Brother before talking about Blood in my Eye. And I specifically mentioned that because I know Blood in my Eye speaks directly to people in an advanced stage of resistance, but I don’t think that you can really understand George Jackson until you have read Soledad Brother, because it is truly one of the great books of the 20th century. I also think that it probably will start stretching well into the 21st century…at least that has been my part of the legacy in terms of making sure that the family book stays out there and is read by as many people as possible. I do have something more to say about Blood in my Eye as we go on, but I’ll stop there, and let’s shift into a discursive mode perhaps.
UoF: Thank you. That was great. I’m glad you pointed it out because far too few people understand that George never wanted to plead not guilty to killing the CO. And to comrades privately, he claimed it, of course. A lot of liberal solidarity with George was conditional on his innocence, on the story being that he was framed—not that he was resisting and that he was righteous for doing so. At a certain point, George was fighting with his lawyer because he wanted to use all his legal defense funds to launch his guerrilla group on the outside, right, instead of paying his legal bills? We can’t make our defense of political prisoners conditional on their innocence, because no revolutionary is innocent in the eyes of the state. We don’t support Assata because of her perceived innocence; we support her because she’s a revolutionary, and if she offed some fascists, well, we support her even more.
You hit on this point in your foreword to Soledad Brother too, where you wrote, “George was universally misunderstood by the left and the right alike. As is the case with most modern political prisoners, nearly all of his support came from reformists with liberal leanings. It seems that they acted in spite of, rather than because of, the core of his message.” I’m reminded by the message from the Palestinian resistance: If you are in solidarity with our corpses but not our rockets, you are a hypocrite and not one of us. We have to transcend this liberal framework of solidarity that only defends colonized people, whether Palestinians in Gaza or Africans in amerika, when they are passive victims, not when they are resisting. Otherwise we will only be co-opted and our politics diluted.
It goes without saying, but everyone reading this should read Blood in my Eye, Soledad Brother, and your forthcoming book. (Please make note of the Jackson Family’s request to not buy new copies of Blood in my Eye from Black Classic Press until things are made right with the Family.)
JPJ Jr: Once you’ve read Soledad Brother and Blood in my Eye, or if you just read one or even part of one, you’re going to want to understand what happened. And it’s really important for young people in the struggle to understand what happened during that period of history and what was learned and what was lost. Sadly, one of the effects of having baby boomer leftists run the show is that a lot of them aren’t that eager to let that history be known. So if you want to know the source, “Why don’t I know about George Jackson, what happened on August 7th, 1970?” Listen, I’m Gen X. It was our parents that did not allow that message to get out.
UoF: For sure. Reading Blood in my Eye, having access to that as a teenager, is what made me a communist.
JPJ Jr: Beautiful.
UoF: If George was writing that fascism is here in 1970, we have to understand which stage of fascism we are in today, and develop a corresponding level of resistance. At his time, there was an anti-imperialist underground of active guerrilla formations—not the case today, but I think people are beginning to ask these questions again because of the escalating repression and because the Al-Aqsa Flood put the question of armed resistance back on the table. In our view, the contradictions are really intensified internationally and domestically right now, the most they have been in our lifetimes.
JPJ Jr: Fully agree. But here’s what I think about that, and you’ll see this specificity with me over and over and over again because maybe it’s my training at the discursive level. I think the term at hand and what needs to be remembered always is apply. Because the thing is, the situation when I wrote the foreword [to Soledad Brother] in 1994, the situation when George was writing in ’68 or ’71, it is not quite accurate to just say he was writing about things that are happening today. That doesn’t work, at least not in my philosophical understanding about how time works. And so what we have to understand is how to apply these things to a world that George obviously could have never imagined and that I couldn’t have imagined when I wrote that foreword at 23 years old.
I also believe that it is our job as leftists who don’t shy away from confrontation and conflict when it’s necessary to do a better job of translating of our situation and what is going on for us at the moment. Because in general, when people understand something clearly, there is a degree, however slight, of a shift towards the progressive stance…and they have to retreat a little bit off of their total petty bourgeois line. A lot of times people, and I’m talking about the general populace here, will shrink back from how we should say UGW [urban guerrilla warfare] or any other form that leftist resistance can take, and not when they see state militarism. But that’s a translation issue. And it’s a communication issue because what we need on the left is for people to understand when everyone walks out of work, or at least let’s just say 65% of people walk out of work, marching down the street, there needs to be a degree of translation so that the extra 15-20% can join the 65%. It is not how they literally view it. It’s a translation issue. They don’t understand the context.
UoF: Absolutely. We are in a constant process of raising consciousness that demands we be explicit and clear with what we are saying. For example, it’s important we are precise in that we are not trying to make Amerika a “better place,” or build socialism in Amerika—no, we are trying to destroy Amerika. And I think it’s condescending to assume the masses are too dumb to grasp these ideas, which is the defeatist—and elitist—outlook some organizers have. Maybe Ivy League college students and Democrat voters don’t grasp these ideas, but some portions of the masses absolutely do. During my time inside, my fellow inmates absolutely grasped political ideas; in fact they hungered for political education. If Ho Chi Minh could translate Marx into Vietnamese, teach peasants how to read, and start a people’s war…if George could organize entire prison populations…then we can definitely overcome the obstacles of Amerikan illiteracy and stop making up defeatist cop-outs.
But not everyone sees it this way, and not everyone doing “revolutionary” organizing in this country even believes that revolution is possible here. Which logically should be our starting point—that revolution and victory are possible, and they are possible within our lifetime. But there is this swath of “revolutionaries” here in Amerika who see the task of making the revolution and doing the fighting and the dying as the task of exclusively the Third World, which is obviously very racist and social-imperialist in essence.
It would be suicidal to pretend this divide does not exist in today’s nascent revolutionary movement. It does exist, and there are people who say they’re part of this movement who aren’t actually in it for the same reasons as us. Publicly addressing that isn’t divisive or sectarian; it’s a necessary debate to have, a contradiction to draw out into the open. Because a lot of the counterinsurgency we’re experiencing isn’t necessarily being enacted directly by the state’s repressive apparatus—it’s being enacted by people within the movement who want to frame themselves as the “good” protestors and us as the “bad” militants. They want to keep demanding reform, and the state wants them to keep demanding reform, and they are mad that we are building revolution. Actual revolution, not some faraway abstraction.
I mean, it reminds me of how George said, if you could define fascism in one word, that word would be reform. The development of fascism between George’s time and now has been fascism constantly reforming itself.
JPJ Jr: Well, okay, so let’s look at that…let’s say a few words about the Black Panther Party then, because I left that out of the initial history. There were the divisions within the party, petty squabbles. That’s where George’s quote comes from, “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 live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.” But a lot of that has to get done directly through IRL channels, so to speak. And so one of the things that the establishment is very comfortable with is that we are not communicating through IRL channels very often. The tendency to have leftist interventions be a hindrance to progress is something that the Panthers dealt with. And so people should study the history of the Black Panther Party and then come to people in Gen X to break down some of the mistakes that those books made. Because a lot of the books, they just don’t know. You can interview people till the cows come home, but until you’re talking to me or somebody who was a direct descendant of that, you can’t really know what the history was.
UoF: Absolutely. It’s hard to filter through the historical revisionism, especially when this entire generation of Third Worldist revolutionaries and communist revolutionaries within the US were either imprisoned or assassinated or exiled or neutralized into liberal academics. Speaking of academics, I know your memoir will get into your relationship with Angela Davis while you were growing up, but do you want to speak to that at all here, how she fits into your family’s history?
JPJ Jr: Let’s take a pause there because we’ll get sidetracked otherwise. Of course, I’m always open to speaking about Angela, but we have to be a little more specific. And the reason for that is that Angela is such a polarizing figure…she’s a receptacle for misunderstanding. Also, and she and I have talked about this, she’s a receptacle for a degree of blind faith. So I always want to be very specific when I’m talking about Angela, because for some people in their stages of development, Angela’s voice is really, really important.She’s done some really substantial work, but it has to be understood not as an end game but as a stage of development…because Angela came from a very bourgeois background. Angela worked within the confines of the institution for the better part of, somebody else could probably tell me better, 45, 40 years, something like that. And Angela retains her emeritus gold card. Okay, that’s not talking shit. That’s just the reality.
So I would take it one step further than your formulation of liberal professors and say that radical professorship is nowhere, man. There’s functionally no difference between them. I would leave out maybe one or two from there, Robin DG Kelly being one. But there is functionally no difference between radical professorship and liberal professorship. They can come at me all they want. I’ll sit up there like the Chomsky/Foucault debate if they want to. But I would say that from my position and, getting into a little bit of my biography, being banished from the academy after having completed my doctoral work but essentially living as an outsider working person, hustling to get by, etc. but having gotten the training that was necessary to do what it is that they do, I could tell you, and I went to the academy at the highest level possible. I have three master’s degrees and a PhD from Berkeley, Cornell, and a Columbia satellite in Europe. So there’s no part of the institution that I didn’t see. And I can tell you with full conviction, radical professorship actually doesn’t even exist.
See, when you work in service of an institution, that institution coerces you in ways that you’re not even aware of. So let’s just take, for example, ‘time.’ :et’s just get down to everyday lived experience. Your life is run by the schedule of the institution. What has more power over you than that? The way that you experience your day-to-day, year-to year-life. There are times when I can’t even talk to the few academics that I need to have a conversation with about whatever it is, whether it’s the NBA finals or the epistemology of something. They can’t do it…why…they’re grading finals or whatever it is. At that basic fundamental level, you are being controlled by a billion-dollar institution. So yeah, great armchair. It’s very nice. Enjoy your privilege, live behind your walls. But that’s only part of it. The real issue with academia, and I talk about that occasionally online on Twitter just as a jest, but it’s not really a jest…We actually really do need People’s Universities. And the great part is…guess what? The infrastructure already exists. It’s campuses all over the country.
UoF: Yeah. I mean, I didn’t realize how much time you’ve spent in the academy, and I’m curious what your assessment is of the Student Intifada, and the ongoing discursive battle over its legacy. Unity of Fields writes a lot about the Student Intifada and has come out of the Student Intifada in some ways.
JPJ Jr: Well, specifically in this case, what is needed at this particular junction on March 12th nearing 4pm in the afternoon Pacific time, is that a charismatic, media-friendly spokesperson needs to step forward…not on their own, but as a product of an ask by a committee. Do you understand what I’m saying?
To address the media, and by media I mean broad scope media, both mainstream media and social media. I have seen, and again, I’m old enough to be in a father role to the students…I’m old enough to be their dad, so obviously I have concerns, etc. We can talk about that in a minute…But the tactical response right now is you’ve got to address the media. And I saw Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyers’ press conference today, and it was fine and very functional, but it is not enough, and it’s not actually coming from the student-led orgs. I saw that last summer. There’s always a juncture, there’s always a point in time in which that is needed. Last summer, I felt that things began to fray a little bit because of that. You would see a few people talking outside their tents. You would see this and that people addressing the microphone. But I didn’t see any form of actuated leadership. I am not chronically online, but I’m pretty online. You got to remember, I’m coming out of a 10-year isolation where I was living in a house in the woods. So I’m pretty savvy about my online shit, and I just didn’t see it. Maybe it happened and it didn’t pass my radar. But if you don’t do it early, it’s too late.
So somebody’s got to step up, and somebody has to take the slings and arrows. Somebody has to be able to handle the slings and arrows, unlike the usual White House press secretary across administrations. I mean, they can’t handle anything. Let’s be real for anybody who’s listening to this: if you have any type of organization, the one or two people that could handle that role…you know who they are…okay, ask ’em. No, everybody can’t fulfill every role in a movement. It’s very important on a basic tactical level to understand that. I mean, you mentioned urban guerrilla warfare, so we’re talking basic Ho Chi Minh tactics here, Uncle Ho. There has to be a lack of ego in the group such that you can identify people’s talents and put them in their roles, ask them, or better ask them to be in their roles. That’s one of the problems with the Panthers, by the way. It was too top-down. People were getting told to do things that they A: didn’t necessarily want to do, and B: that they weren’t equipped to do. How’s that going to work out?
So can you ask me a specific question about Angela so we can at least talk specifically about her and then we can move on?
UoF: I remember you messaged me when she appeared at one of the Gaza solidarity encampments, I believe it was at a university in Colorado. Did you want to speak to that?
JPJ Jr: Yeah, absolutely. So if I remember correctly, and actually it was around that juncture that we were just talking about, the crucial juncture of having a spokesperson out front. You would see other public figures come and talk, and it was all very fine and gray. And then somebody asked Angela to step up and say a few words. There’s one thing you have to understand about Angela: she is incredibly generous, and also her ability to speak is just almost unsurpassed in public, right? Her ability, I said that backwards, but her ability to speak in public is almost unsurpassed. She is adept at that, let’s say it that way, because she’s been in front of microphones for so long, and she also just has a natural gift of communication.
So I am almost positive from having hung around when this sort of thing happened that she was in the area to do something for a local university or something, and they asked her to. But in a very similar way…and maybe you can refresh my memory, something like this went down on the NYU campus too, where a boldfaced name got up and was speaking words, and I believe it might’ve even been within the encampment, although it may have been outside the gates. And when the videos came out, I’m asking—why are they speaking? Somebody said, ‘well, they were asked to by the student group’…but that was the wrong thing to do at the time, and it was the wrong thing to do for Colorado too. The voice has to come from within the movement. So in other words, even if I showed up to…what was the most strident campus in California?
UoF: Cal Poly Humboldt.
JPJ Jr: God bless those brave soldiers.
UoF: Yes. They’re the fucking best.
JPJ Jr: We love that. So let’s just take, for example, a hypothetical. I love hypotheticals. Very necessary within your organizational meetings to have space for people to speak hypothetically, by the way. But let’s just take a hypothetical. I’m cruising through the area on my drive from the Pacific Northwest, where I’m based, down to the Bay Area, and they ask me to stop by right when I am around. I’m not jumping up on a microphone now. Is it Angela’s responsibility to say “no thank you”? Yes, it is. She should have known better, but it also has to come from the organizational side, which is a direct edge—”We love you, dah, dah, dah, dah…We’d love you to write something, but we’re going to pass on the press conference right now or the public speech opportunity right now.’ I think it’s because people deify her or whatever. And I guess there’s some logic to that. But the bottom line is, she’s generationally wrong for that discourse specifically because she’s a baby boomer. She’s three generations removed. Okay? So that’s why I had the reaction online that I did, which is essentially FFS, right? Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Because we can do better. We can do a lot better. We have to do better than that. And that completely disregards the content of the speech because, in many ways, I don’t give a shit. I know what she says, and a lot of it is righteous discourse, albeit just discourse. But let’s put it this way: if you need a space cadet glow, go listen to Angela. If you’re feeling down in the dumps about your position, and don’t get me wrong, you will feel down in the dumps about your subject position. That’s why I always say a sense of humor is one of the most important tools for any revolutionary or anyone on the left, because you’re going to take a lot of losses. So if you’re in that position, go to her, but she is not a spokesperson for a Gen Z movement, she just isn’t. I’d be hard-pressed to think that I am because I’m two generations removed at the most, it should be a millennial. Does that make sense?
So I mean, before we move on, and then I actually do want to move on from Angela, because the thing is, speaking also in the hypothetical, and I think people will understand this more once they study the Jackson story, is in some ways if my father didn’t exist, if my father hadn’t taken over that courthouse at 17 years old, by the way, you wouldn’t even know who Angela is. Period.
UoF: Exactly. But so many more people know who she is than who your father is or who George is.
JPJ Jr: We’ve got to be very clear here. We are not right now dissing or denigrating Angela, because in public there’s no need to talk about that. But what I’m saying is that if you live in that “what if” universe for a second, Angela would’ve been a very distinguished, probably leftist professor at a very nice university, and maybe in some ways, obviously, we would’ve suffered for that a little bit. And because Women, Race, and Class, etc. wouldn’t have come out, and her abolition discourse probably. Well, if those hasn’t come out, they wouldn’t have gotten the widespread understanding that they’ve gotten. And by the way, Angela is very generous in talking about that in her speeches. She says constantly that if it wasn’t for my dad and George, but really my dad, she wouldn’t have had the opportunity that she has had. So it should be sort of understood in that context that she’s an important voice. She’s done really good work. I don’t agree with her on most of what she says about prison abolition. I find it reactionary, and utopian. But that’s okay. We can work through that, and that’s not to say that we shouldn’t completely dismantle the system of incarceration. That’s a given. But I just happen to find her voice on that to both lack precision and not go far enough. And I find it to be reactive against capitalism rather than progressive forward. But that’s another topic for another day, perhaps.
UoF: How do you see the prison as a site of struggle? You mentioned Attica, there have been a lot of uprisings in the New York state prisons very recently.
JPJ Jr: Well, as far as I know, I think there’s a lot of uprisings happening in pockets all over the country. So there’s that. And I also don’t think that incarcerated populations are sort of, what did you say? You said it was ‘a’ site of struggle? I’m just going to add to your discourse a little bit. I don’t think it’s a site of the struggle. I think it’s the site of the struggle. I think it is the epicenter of the struggle. Because the thing is: incarcerated peoples are the manifestation of all of the things wrong with capitalist society. And so the unification and resistance of incarcerated peoples is actually the essence of leftist struggle.
Because if you’re locked up, it is for a reason. And that reason, going back to George Jackson, is because of capitalism. Yes, racism, sexism, and homophobia—all of those things play a role, important roles, but they’re not the reason. The reason is more macro. And that was George’s brilliance. And that’s why the movement, the prisoner’s rights movement in the early sixties began, because they were able to talk to people about ‘Why are you in here?’
Especially if consciousness has happened, or is in the process of happening, there does have to be some degree of political consciousness. You can’t rebel against nothing. It is really important for people to understand that. Otherwise, it just becomes a personal rebellion. And we start talking about psychology…
Unfortunately, third spaces are mostly taken away from Americans. And so that’s another thing that I would say to leftists and organizers and resistors out there, which is Occupy. We’ve all seen the fucking bullshit about Occupy, but I’m going to use the word anyway. Occupy your third spaces that are still available. I don’t give a fuck if it’s a Barnes and Noble, it probably shouldn’t be, but I’m just saying if you live in a rural area or whatever and don’t have other access, occupy that. I guarantee you the person serving coffee to you behind the counter at the Starbucks is more leftist than in some of the other places that you could congregate. And if they’re not, you’ll convert ’em. But for real, occupy your third spaces because through the elevation of political consciousness, the entire space will become yours.
UoF: Yeah, for sure. No, exactly. It’s all about occupying buildings.
JPJ Jr: It is all about occupying buildings of all kinds. And I mean, I think we should talk about Columbia and Humboldt and all the other campuses, and there are many where building occupation is a tactic.
I’m not updated with what’s going on right now in terms of that, but I can tell you that in the past, when I was in my thirties, so you’re talking nineties, early 2010s, what have you, building occupation was a standard thing for us…squatting. And that certainly also used to be the case in London and Detroit…it’s less possible in New York now…but certainly in all cities and some rural areas, it’s totally a tactic, but first of all, you have to learn how to do it. And the way that you learn how to do it is by occupying a space that isn’t contested in the immediate. You get the point, right? Which is, if occupation is your part of the movement, you don’t want the big show to be the first time that you’re doing it. Right? Do you understand what I’m saying?
UoF: Yeah. That makes sense. And there are limitations to just defending a static space like a building or encampment rather than choosing when and where you strike your enemy and then retreat, which is like basic principles of guerrilla warfare.
JPJ Jr: Yes. If occupation is your thing, make occupation your thing. There are all kinds of abandoned areas and even areas in plain sight, like I said, with the people living in the van across the way because there’s a certain toughness that’s involved in that kind of action and a certain mindset, more importantly, that you need to be accustomed to.
UoF: Maybe changing the topic a bit, but one thing I also wanted to ask you about is your art and the role of cultural reproduction in the revolution. Your work is really incredible. We should include it in the artwork for the zine version of this interview.
JPJ Jr: First of all, thank you very much. And I will say that it is not necessarily off-topic, because one of the main tactics of artists is to occupy spaces and work in them. So I can’t count on one hand the number of times that that was just the way we did it. I came up, it was a really vibrant scene in the late 2000s, in the late aughts, as they say, of Black artists in Baltimore. And we would just occupy spaces, frankly. So it’s not necessarily off-topic. You guys should use my piece, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness. And if you’ll remember, that is an emaciated figure chained to the floor. And so yeah, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, I believe I executed that in 2022.
UoF: Yeah, I’m looking at it right now. Beautiful.
JPJ Jr: I did that painting for Ruchell Magee. By the way, Ruchell Magee’s holiday is coming up. We’re going to be doing a little something, and everybody should do a little something on his birthday every year, which is this Sunday, March 16th. Ruchell did 53 years in some of the most brutal penitentiaries in the world for the movement. He could have gotten out of it, but he didn’t. He took the weight. So I did that painting for him. All of my work has heavy political content, but I think this piece in particular speaks more volumes than I could say about it in general. Artists are integral to the world, and I’m about to get controversial here because I have found that in my online discourse that, unfortunately, leftists have not, by and large, acquired Gramsci, which means they don’t understand the nature of cultural production within any kind of capitalism. Forget even postmodern capitalism.
I think the most important part to remember about artistic production, I’m talking real art here, not commercial art, is not simply a reflection always of the world as it exists. I know that viewpoint is controversial, and I know that with a lot of classically trained or just trained Marxists, that will ruffle some feathers. But again, I don’t really give a damn because they don’t know what they’re talking about. I can always tell what people have read by the shit that comes out of their mouth. My grandpa used to say a version of that, Lester Jackson. He always used to tell my cousin Billy that. Anyway…what I want people to remember about artistic production within all progressive movements is that it is not simply a reflection. It can also be a production of a vision. It can shape the world and what is coming. That’s what many Marxists don’t understand, at least what I call vulgar Marxists.
UoF: Of which there are many, unfortunately.
JPJ Jr: Of which there are many, and I got to be frank, it’s fucking tragic because that discourse has been around for 70, 80 years, and it is just not being taught. One of the reasons it’s not being taught, again to beat the dead horse, is because the truly radical voices of my generation were silenced, not just from the right, but also from the left. I want you to name a protégé of Angela Davis, not someone who uses her work, but a direct protégé. I’ll pause….Okay. That’s a problem.
So at its highest level, art can be an incredibly powerful thing to organize around. In fact, it can be the most powerful thing to organize around, hence the need for People’s Museums. And guess what? They already exist, the infrastructure. I’ll say the same thing I said about college campuses. The infrastructure for People’s museums already exists, but you cannot go forward without proper aesthetic components because if you do, you’re improperly recognizing the stage of postmodern capitalism that we are in now.
The main problem with leftist progressive movements is that there is a vacuum of leadership. We have a rudderless ship, as they say on the seas, and that’s some scary shit if you can’t steer your boat, or even if the till or the wheel is there. Let’s just say that the wheel is there, so the infrastructure exists to steer the ship, and if nobody knows how or if nobody is at the wheel, you have real-world problems. I don’t see a lot of Gen X, millennial, Gen Z leadership…it’s maybe not appropriate for Gen Z yet, but there is a vacuum of voices that are stepping up or can step up. There’s some desire to step up, but with no support, you’re just speaking into a void. Yeah.
UoF: Absolutely. Anarchists tend to diagnose the existence of leadership as the problem when, like you said, the absence of radical leadership is the problem. There are self-appointed “movement leaders,” but they are mostly liberal opportunists, and these opportunists take the lead precisely because there are these structural vacuums. We need to create an alternative leadership that isn’t NGO shit and also isn’t this anarchistic no-leadership shit. And like I said earlier, we lost a whole generation of revolutionary leadership to COINTELPRO. Is there anyone today you do consider a leader?
JPJ Jr: No. No. At least, I mean, in the US, in the Global South, it’s different. I try to stay very specific to my situation because I am not a liberal. One of the lessons I learned after coming back from the Middle East is that whenever I would communicate back, my comrades there were so involved in their struggle that they just didn’t have the lens to lend a perspective to my situation.
That’s okay. In fact, that means it’s radical. And let’s forget about expressions of solidarity for a minute. That’s important, but let’s just suspend that for a second. I try to stay really, really involved in my particular situation, which is being a Black Radical in the United States of America. So that’s what I mean when you asked your question, and I said, ‘No,’ I mean, ‘No,’ fair enough. We aren’t at that stage here. Internationally, we’re talking about some different things. And yes, Hamas and the leadership there are doing a fantastic job, I think, just to put it in general terms. You know what I’m saying? And I very well may be, I mean, I could be sitting there right now and have a different view, but I’m just saying that in terms of my context. I yearn for leadership voices here in the States, as you call it, the belly of the beast. The reason I yearn for that is twofold. Either A: I want to sort of follow what it is that they’re saying and respond, ‘Yeah, right on! I’m down with that! How can I help?’ Or B: cut them to shreds. I mean, deconstruct every single thing that they’re talking about…and everybody would benefit from it, probably including them.
But the tragic part of this is a lot of this stuff currently being spouted is beneath my comment, frankly, when you see some university poser or something like that, getting up there talking loud…
UoF: Absolutely. I want to be respectful of your time, but do you have any last words?
JPJ Jr: We can definitely pick up some threads at another time. But the crucial thing is that my book, Notes of a Radical Son, is coming out next spring with Seven Stories Press. It was originally supposed to be this fall, but there have been some, how should we say, there’ve been a few struggles with constraints of the published industry, between the story they want vs. the story I need to tell. Of course I lived the first 19 years of my life under an assumed identity as a result of August 7th. I think it will be really interesting for people to read about my experience of the revolution.
UoF: We can’t wait.
JPJ Jr: Thank you. Yeah, it should be great. One way or another, it is coming out in the spring. So whether it’s by traditional route, and I signed a really good book contract with a lot of distribution…So whether it’s by that route or if stuff just gets too heavy, we’ll either go to another smaller house that can get it done quickly, or I’ll just start serializing it on my Substack. By the way, if people want to keep up with what I’m doing day to day, that’s my primary mode of expression right now. And it’s just under my full name, Jonathan Peter Jackson.
The other important part of that memoir, I speak of ‘that’ memoir, it’s been done for five months, so I kind of think about it as ‘that’ book now. But I guess it’s ‘this’ book…the historical section about where the Jacksons come from is probably one of the more important anchors of the story, because California is only a middle part of the entire legacy as it stands now. And so that part and my 10 years in seclusion, I think are things that people will really want to try to acquire and understand because I don’t make moves lightly. When I decided to withdraw from society, it was for very good reasons. I think that I came to understand a lot during that period. As you know, I’m always talking to you about trekking and the need to be outside in your natural environment.
The main message that I would give about getting outside is that everyone in the larger progressive movement has a role to play. Nobody has no role to play. It’s really foolish to think that everyone has to do the same and think the same things and think the same way in order to bring about the desired results. That notion is being discouraged within the current form of how we’re interacting with each other. But it’s a really important thing to remember that in a larger social movement, everybody has a different role to play. So play a role. And if you don’t know your role, trust people that you trust to help you find your role.
UoF: Absolutely, we need to commit our lives to the struggle and find our role if we don’t know it already, because we all have one. Life is revolution, to quote George. And the world will die if we don’t read and act out its imperatives.
JPJ Jr: It’s a way of life for all of us. It’s very complicated. I mean, it’s simple in its conception, and it’s simple, certainly in its realization and its goal, but the enactment of the struggle is very nuanced. And nuance is a thing that we don’t know how to talk about anymore because it’s been hijacked by our devices. So the struggle, and again, you’ll find this in advanced resistance movements in, say, the West Bank and Gaza, where there’s an understanding of the nuance of life, you can pray, and if that brings you solace, you should pray. Whether that’s to Allah or Marx, hell yeah. Okay. But it’s complicated, and it’s nuanced, and it requires community organization.
UoF: Definitely, it’s complicated—moving from just reading and discussing these ideas to applying them materially, especially in the belly of the beast. A revolution here is going to look like no revolution that has ever taken place before. I mean, there are experiences we can learn from elsewhere, but it’s going to be so unique in this prison house of nations at such an acute degree of capitalist development. But we’ll only learn by trying.
JPJ Jr: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll hijack a line from some show I was watching where they were talking about, ‘Well, it looks like it’s going to be another tough year.’ And the guy says, ‘Well, to be honest, I don’t remember a year that wasn’t tough.’ You can bring that down to the daily level. It’s literally a daily struggle. So let’s pick this back up next time.
UoF: We’re excited to talk to you again soon, and to read your book. Thank you so, so much.
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