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Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2006), takes its place as the most enthusiastic champion of the New Left and Weatherman specifically. Berger, for example, generally touts a line articulated by the former Weatherman Robert Roth: “Weather’s early politics . . . ‘represented an insistence on up-front support for Black liberation as a centerpiece for any political movement among white people.’ ” (102). That Weatherman indeed articulated such politics cannot be questioned. That in its practice Weatherman also disparaged the two leading black nationalist groups of the day, SNCC and the Black Panthers, ignored their organizational advice and criticisms, and promoted a version of black leadership that did not exist in the social life of black people at the time, this, too, cannot be denied. But Berger avoids a deep analysis of this conflict. In varying degrees, Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), and Ron Jacobs, The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground (New York: Verso Press, 1997), both weight their accounts of Weatherman on the side of what the organization was saying about itself, rather than what it actually did, relative to the black and Third World movements of the day. Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (New York: Verso Press, 2002), follows the same methodology in tracing the history of Weatherman’s SDS rival faction, RYM II.

— A Hard Rain Fell by David Barber

In short, the New Left refused to examine gender seriously, and, in refusing that examination, it continued to uncritically accept as natural U.S. society’s definitions of gender. Those women who rose to prominence within the New Left were in general women who could “out-macho” men.

— A Hard Rain Fell by David Barber

Traditional Marxist and class struggle analysis have always had a very bad understanding of the race and gender — the concept that those two systems of exploitation were a “fruit” of capitalist society and would be eliminated when the class struggle is resolved fails to analytically criticize a culture based in racism and sexism — both of which came into the picture way before capitalism was around — and how the power structure of privilege does not have to be ratified by the police, the capitalists or even the State. Culture alone can be a catalyst of exploitation and submission, and the change and the complete revolution in the bourgeoisie social fabric cannot be done by simply taking the bourgeois out of the picture.

— Our Culture, Our Resistance Volume 2

I don’t think the process [of abolishing prisons] has started. I say this not as a critique but as an observation. If you want to tear something down, you get a sledgehammer, you get the tools for tearing it down; you don’t show up with a picket sign or a petition or a bullhorn. Nobody ever tore anything down with a bullhorn. That’s not to say those aren’t useful tools for what they do. They are. So if you want to raise consciousness and gain popular support and so on, those are useful. But that’s not tearing anything down. I think if you want to tear something down, if that is your goal, then you have to focus on the question of how to tear it down—not the question of how to get others to agree with you. Tearing it down is a simple process.

— Rattling the Cages by Angela Y. Davis, Josh Davidson, Sara Falconer

While there always is a core of people who support political prisoners, I think largely our movements have failed to build the same kind of strong support that you see in many places—for instance, the Palestinian struggle or the Irish struggle. In those movements, support for political prisoners is seen as totally central. There are many reasons for this. The lack of clarity about the nature of the state and the necessity of resistance is certainly one reason.

I also think the divide between supporting those who go to prison for political reasons and those who are inside because of capitalism, colonialism, misogyny, et cetera, has not been helpful to us. I think we should be making those connections to shine light on the nature of the system as a whole. The fact that the movements for abolition—to defund the police, to end mass incarceration, to abolish ICE—are gaining so much strength opens up possibilities to strengthen the work to support folks inside.

I also think making intergenerational connections is so important. There are still many political prisoners who have been inside for decades who we have not been able to get released. And there is a new generation of political prisoners, and there will be more. While people come out of different movements, it’s important that we see the connections, the legacy of resistance. No movement can grow if it can’t support the people who are willing to take risks to change things.

— Rattling the Cages by Angela Y. Davis, Josh Davidson, Sara Falconer

Close to the buffer zone with Israel, Gazans have paved a road called shari‘ al-jakar, literally translated as “street of spite,” as a symbolic claim to sovereignty, spiting their previous overlords by proving they can pave their own roads without Israel’s permission. The deep satisfaction derived from such an action is easily understood. Driving around the land where the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip had once stood, one can see the wide multilane highways that used to connect the Jewish-only settlement blocks where eight thousand inhabitants lived. Extending alongside them are the dusty, potholed one-lane roads that the 1.8 million Palestinians had been forced to use. Against this blueprint of Israel’s colonization of Gaza, Palestinians are now free to build their own infrastructure, wherever they want. And the pleasure felt from this sense of liberty, of quasi sovereignty, is immense. This is so even when everyone understands all too well how truncated such sovereignty is. In matters of life and death, Israel’s occupation grinds on relentlessly in the form of an external structure of control on a besieged population. But within this prison cell, Gazans have staked their flag.

— Hamas contained by Tareq Baconi

When you become a revolutionary you tend to see everyday reality in absolute terms. Compromise, bargaining, profit, lose their meaning. With this gun in my hand and the knowledge that these comrades will fight and die on my side, I lose the habit of thinking as I once did, defensively, calculatingly, egocentrically. When we say, with the Cubans, Victory or Death, we literally mean it. This has already given us a [taste] of liberation.

— Palestine guerrillas by Hisham Sharabi

Despite the loudly announced exchange of prisoners in January 2010 (with the exchange of Palestinians for the Israeli soldier, Shalit) suggestive of a large decrease in the numbers incarcerated, in fact the release of about 1,000 detainees during the exchange did not reduce the overall number of detainees; the number of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons was estimated at 4,700, of which there were 185 children and 320 administrative detainees. Between January 2012 and 23 March 2012, there were about 900 detentions throughout the 1967 occupied territories. These included tens of children, women, members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) and a number of those who were released, were then arrested again (Ferwana 2013).

— Captive revolution by Nahla Abdo-Zubi

In early 1968, Nayef Hawatmeh and a group that included a number of Palestinian and non-Palestinian Arabs also left the ANM [Arab Nationalist Movement] to join the PFLP. The PFLP, however, was divided by the transplanted ideological struggle between the so-called left and right factions, with the leftist minority represented by Saleh Ra’fat, ‘Omar al-Qassem, Yasser ‘Abd-Rabbo, Hawatmeh, Mamdouh Nowfal, Muhammad Katmattu, and Hasan Ju‘ba, among others (Y. Sayigh 1997, 208, 228). During the August 1968 congress of the PFLP, while [George] Habash was imprisoned in Syria, the group revised the platform of the PFLP to incorporate class struggle as an important component (International Documents on Palestine [IDP] 1971, 424) and came to dominate the new PFLP Executive Committee. After Habash’s prison escape in November 1968, the PFLP Executive Committee was reformulated to include only one of the dissidents (El-Rayyes and Nahas 1974, 37). When the PFLP leadership attempted to purge the dissenters, Fateh intervened (O’Neill 1978, 129). This conflict was resolved when the dissenters split from the PFLP to form the DFLP.

— Resistance, repression, and gender politics in occupied Palestine and Jordan by Frances Susan Hasso

Functioning as both the umbrella organization for a revolution and a state has produced many of the problems that have historically bedeviled the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization].

— Resistance, repression, and gender politics in occupied Palestine and Jordan by Frances Susan Hasso

Nationalism often attempts to buttress its project by subsuming the complicating fault lines of gender, religion, age, sexuality, education, class, and ideological differences. Such differences, however, come to the fore as stakes in the project increase. This occurred in both DF branches and in political organizations more generally in the Occupied Territories and Jordan after the start of the Palestinian uprising in late 1987.

— Resistance, repression, and gender politics in occupied Palestine and Jordan by Frances Susan Hasso

Social-movement theorist Jack Goldstone has made the plea for students of dissent to widen the standard notion of repression—state agents violently clashing with protesters in the open—in order to incorporate the state’s extensive repertoire of sanctions, including non-violent ones, that it carries out against its dissident citizens. This is precisely what Beyond Bullets sets out to do.

— Beyond Bullets by Jules Boykoff

The First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution are often retracted, if temporarily, in the name of national security. Supporters of this logic reason that in moments of national crisis, unity should be the tune of the day, and those who refuse to sing along—dissident citizens and others— are dangerous denizens who are jeopardizing national security. Suppressing the actions of these people is thus seen as more acceptable by the general public. State suppression is rationalized rhetorically in ways that emphasize exceptional, perilous circumstances.

— Beyond Bullets by Jules Boykoff