Revolutionary Reading Club

Abolish the Border, Abolish the Police Reading List In solidarity with all those standing up for our communities against the brutality of immigrant detention and police repression, we offer an extensive reading list about border and police ab...

We made a reading list for you.

Martin Sostre was arrested in his Afro-Asian Bookstore shortly after the black rebellion in Buffalo during the summer of 1967. Since the state couldn't implicate him in any illegal political activity, he was booked on contrived dope charges and brought before a white judge and an all-white jury where he was bound, gagged and sentenced to 30-41 years. This is a picture of a vacant lot where that bookstore once stood. that has a single fence board with posters and literature posted. There’s a small community garden beyond that. Just cut out of frame is a Free Library.

Martin was given Clemency in 1975 and spent the rest of his life working in Paterson, NJ creating daycare centers and community spaces. This is a picture Across the street from the former Afro-Asian bookstore. The single fence board with posters and literature posted is visible on the right, There’s a small community garden across the way and a free library.

“Culture should always be used as a medium to project our revolutionary anarchist message…If the artist is projecting raised consciousness & interpreting the revolution in simple strokes of his pen or brush a poster is a very effective form.” - Martin Sostre

📸: Minolta 450si
🎞️: 35mm Cinestill 400

It's so true. Book club leftists are not "typical people." We are alien beings who came to this planet because we heard it has good books and snacks, and we were very distressed to discover what y'all are doing down here.

...for new ways of organizing social life that were not rooted in domination, extraction, or accumulation."

The Attica rebels' violence "was only the outermost layer of a manifold struggle that was ultimately about the capacity for Black radical futurity, the evolution of human being, the preservation of historical consciousness, the development of love and intimacy, and the search...

...and affective insurgency that aimed to expose and ameliorate carceral repression while also abolishing the anti-Black class war of which prisons are a part."

"I have also shown that prisons are sites of counter-war, a term that reflects the fact that captive rebels were responding to an antagonism they did not initiate.... [Imprisoned] people engaged in capacious forms of physical, cultural, psychological, epistemic, narrative, spiritual...

manipulate Black sexuality; and destroy Black revolutionary minds."

...tantamount to permanent race and class war.... [Agents] of the state employed carceral institutions to stifle Black intellectual, cultural, and political development; neutralize autonomous Black radical organization; thwart Black internationalism; eradicate Black rebellion;

...as a world system, and the global project of patriarchal white supremacy that underwrites it. From the time of its formation, the US state has used its monopoly over the legitimate use of violence (via law, policing, and prisons) to reproduce capitalist social relations, a project that is...

"US prisons are a site of war. While the story I have told begins in the late 20th century, I employed a Black radical interpretive framework that locates the origins of this war in the 16th century, with the onset of the European trade in enslaved Africans, the rise of capitalism...

Our next book will be A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre, by Garrett Felber. Sostre was a bookseller, an anarchist, a political prisoner, and a jailhouse lawyer. He owned three radical bookstores in Buffalo and played an important role in our city's history.

"The Long Attica Revolt was revolutionary... because the communal, internationalist, and autonomous practices that emerged presaged a new social order, new ethics, and new forms of human sociality."

...toward a radically new future while enhancing its capacity for creativity, consciousness, cooperation, and moral evolution."

"James and Grace Lee Boggs... conceptualize revolution as a positive social and political project, a collective process that draws on the internal resources of the people engaged in revolutionary struggle, propelling humanity...

"When liberal humanist fixations with rights and incorporation into imperialist regimes are dislodged, a remarkable truth becomes evident: the Auburn [prison] rebels were never defeated. The incomprehensible violence of the state failed to divest them of their will to resist and become."

"At the same time that the FBI was going to great lengths to crush the Black liberation movement, it was hospitable to... organized white supremacy within the police, the prisons, and the military, leading [to the] present in which white nationalism and homegrown fascism are flourishing in the open"

"The shape of the world they began to build in place of what they began to tear down was not predetermined. Rather, it was improvised through the unfolding of the Revolt, a collective movement toward freedom."

"Attica rebels engaged in a praxis of abolition, generating abolitionist knowledge, theory, and practice amid conditions of carceral war. They not only imagined and dreamed a world without prisons, but put their bodies on the line to materialize their vision in the face of determined opposition."

But they are also domains of militant contestation, where captive populations reject these white supremacist systems of power and invent zones of autonomy, freedom, and liberation."

"Tip of the Spear argues that prisons are war. They are state strategies of race war, class war, colonization, and counterinsurgency.

cover image of tip of the spear by orisanmi burton

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Dr. Orisanmi Burton

This book is excellent. You should read it. We will quote from it in this thread.

It's time to take a break from the election cycle and talk about transformative struggle for liberation. Join us tonight at Burning Books! All are welcome, even if you haven't read the book.

anti-racist book discussion series, The Black Antifascist Tradition, Burning Books, 7pm on June 25

"School is not important. Work is not important. Nothing is more important than stopping Fascism, because Fascism will stop us all." -Fred Hampton

Join us, @surjbuffalo.bsky.social, and the Progressive Book Club to discuss the long history of Black-led resistance to US fascism.