The Attica rebellion was not only about prison "reform." The prison is the most intense expression of a system of imperialist domination that operates at every scale.
55 years ago today, and three weeks after the assassination of Black revolutionary George Jackson at San Quentin State Prison, from September 9-13, 1971, politicized Black prisoners in New York’s Attica State Prison asserted their humanity and dignity in a revolt against the state’s carceral war against them. The Attica rebels – primarily Black men from the working class and ‘lumpenproletariat’ politicized by their conditions and the historical moment of Black anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance – were responding to conditions of war against their being and their humanity, in line with both previous rebellions of incarcerated peoples and the insurgencies of anti-colonial revolutionaries of the period. In this process, the rebels asserted what Orisanmi Burton has called an ‘insurgent counter-humanism’ that envisioned dignity, self-determination, and a radical possibility of collective self-actualization through the challenge and anticipated defeat of interlocked systems of oppression.[1] In this assertion, though, they did not simply localize their demands on the prison, New York State, or even the U.S.; they placed their struggle firmly with a broader anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and Black internationalist vision of global social revolution.
In his groundbreaking study of the Long Attica Revolt, Tip of the Spear, Burton describes the abolitionist internationalism of the rebels partially through the ‘maximalist demands’ that they articulated, which included some that were directed not at the state but at their comrades in “the anti-imperialist Black underground” who they hoped would spark a general insurrection on ‘the outside’, inspired by the rebels who had taken over their wing of the prison but were effectively trapped and vulnerable.[2] Unfortunately, the movement outside of the prison failed to sufficiently support the Attica rebels by advancing revolt on the outside. At the end of those 4 days of rebellion and radical space-taking, state law enforcement penetrated the prison’s D-wing, killed 39 people including freedom fighters and guards, and proclaimed both victory and moral superiority – striking a violent blow for a quickly consolidating U.S. fascist neoliberalism.
Today, we must revive the Attica rebels’ internationalist demands for solidarity and resistance to empire at all scales as part of challenging and defeating the latest fascist wave of U.S. imperialist repression, attempted liquidation of radical forces, and broader genocidal offensive against those who dare to resist domination.
A look at the Attica rebels’ demands gives us a starting point for this revival. The official list of agreed-upon demands delivered to then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller are listed in the Attica Liberation Faction’s “Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Oppression Platform,”[3] and focus mostly on improving prison conditions and changing the structure of imprisonment, rights to information and education, right to organize, an end to racist abuse, and dignity through higher quality food and visitation allowances – we can understand these as assertions of the rebels’ People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs), as defined by them from their position opposing the crushing oppression of everyday life in Attica. These rights-based demands, however, were supplemented by the internal internationalist demands of complete amnesty and “speedy and safe transportation out of confinement to a non-imperialistic country” as well as the underlying radical current articulated by Attica survivor Joseph Little in later testimony that called for not reform of the prison’s brutal methods of supposed rehabilitation but for a focus on rehabilitating society and overturning the oppressive status quo.[4]
These simultaneous articulations of what Burton calls ‘minimalist’ and ‘maximalist’ demands can serve as the foundation for a key lesson for radical, revolutionary, and even progressive movements today. Even though the rebels’ maximalist internationalist and revolutionary demands were not articulated in the unified and official negotiations with the state, those who advanced them were given permission by the collective to pursue them. In hindsight, we can recognize these demands as providing a few key lessons in their: (1) direct and concrete challenge against structures of oppression in their immediate vicinity; (2) establishment of alternative popular and liberatory structures of power that experimented with new social relations – what George Jackson conceptualized as the Black Commune; and (3) the legitimization of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle in the midst of negotiations with the state and a refusal to cede arbitration of full humanity to the U.S. fascist state.
The relationships that laid the foundations for these demands were developed over years – evidenced by Bobby Seale and other Black Panther Party members entering the prison to support rebels in their negotiations and Black Liberation Army members attempting to travel to Attica after the start of the revolt, the adoption of demands similar to the 1970 Folsom Strike, the central role of George Jackson’s organizing and assassination just two weeks earlier, and the communications between the rebels and both South Vietnamese Liberation forces and Black U.S. exiles living in revolutionary Cuba. Without such relationships, these maximalist demands could indeed be discarded as idealist fantasies; instead, we must take them seriously, which means we must also take seriously the duty of anti-imperialist, liberation movements on the outside to support catalytic revolts through mass and popular resistance.
At the same time, the obscuring of maximalist demands after the revolt, investigation, and testimonies by survivors, has been part of the broader counterinsurgent campaign to deny Attica’s international and revolutionary relevance for the last 55 years, while systematically breaking apart and demonizing anti-imperialist internationalist solidarity. This is part of a quieter counterinsurgent war not only on Attica’s rebels and their history, but on Black radicals and the possibilities represented by an anti-imperialist abolitionist internationalism. We see the continuity of such counterinsurgent campaigns in the recent controversial open letter to “Iran’s political prisoners” published in the Guardian on Aug. 20, 2026.[5] Several comments on this letter point out how commitment to an idealist abolitionism and paper “anti-imperialism” results in counterinsurgent co-optation by U.S. imperialism. In particular, the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective, which names the letter as direct counterinsurgency, and Ajamu Baraka,[6] who points out how a PCHR framing can help us understand the principled and politically-responsible position of supporting anti-imperialist resistance in Iran and beyond, highlighting the enduring importance the Attica rebels’ material challenge to, and demands of empire.
When we take a global perspective, we understand why this counterinsurgency is such a priority for U.S. imperialism. Since 2023, four key sites of anti-imperialist resistance have been constantly besieged by all forms of warfare in the imperialist state’s attempt to quell decades-long resistance: Palestine, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. These struggles for national liberation and social revolution are intertwined with Attica’s abolitionist internationalism. As George Jackson conceptualized, prison is just the most intense form of an exploitative and perverse system of centralized economic power, corporatist political domination, and false democracy – a system that is mirrored across scales of imperialist plunder: the local, the national, and the global.[7] These conditions, as in Attica, breed inevitable revolts that aim to destroy the current oppressive system in its entirety, as well as the physical prison that is fundamental to its operation, and would support the construction of a generative, grassroots alternative. That alternative, however, must be supported by meaningful resistance and continued solidarity action by those not under the most intensive expression of imperialist siege – those on the proverbial ‘outside’, however it might be defined. The conditions for this must be nurtured.
As Attica still lives 55 years later, this is our task: to learn from the revolt, demands, and legacy of the Attica rebels and re-revolutionize how we connect and undertake internationalist solidarity and local resistance as grassroots formations. The joining of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-racist struggles requires us to build the conditions and actively support resistance to empire through a grounded, materialist, comprehensive, anti-imperialist that can advance “the sovereignty, self-determination, dignity, and material well-being” “of the peoples and nations under U.S.-led imperialism’s genocidal boot, through a process “from the bottom-up, emanating from mass struggles that reflect a commitment to both individual and collective rights,”.[8] Meaning that these rights, and the demand for their respect, must be advanced through struggle by those most oppressed by the interlocked structures of oppression. But it is those on the ‘outside’ who must resist in solidarity and shift the conditions so that alternatives rooted in popular power can flourish.
Today, our movement must indeed mobilize, but in learning from Attica, “lawful and peaceful mass demonstrations [are] necessary but radically insufficient for revolutionary struggle against a system engaged in genocidal war”.[9] This is particularly important as we move toward the final months of 2026 and into 2027, which require at minimum a mass and popular focus on:
- direct and widespread opposition to ongoing genocidal global policies and wars of the U.S.-zionist imperialist alliance on Gaza, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, and Sudan;
- disruption of an expanding apparatus of surveillance, repression, and fascist overreach via A.I.-backed technologies and territorial occupations in the form of hyperscale data centers and military installations;
- adoption of a framework of climate and environmental liberation to challenge the rapidly advancing ecological devastation and climate crisis that U.S.-led imperialism and militarism have wrought on the planet;
- defense against the counterinsurgency of the rightwing-fascists with immediate state power, as well as the liberal-fascists waiting to co-opt radical momentum;
- and the support of the upcoming 2027 National Prisoners’ Human Rights Strike that continues the emancipatory legacy of Attica.
Understanding these tasks and others, today’s movements must recommit and focus on forging revolutionary consciousness-building efforts through grassroots struggle at local, regional, national, and international levels. At the same time, this consciousness-building must go toward the growth and expansion of independent, radical, mass organization of Black, Brown, working class, and all oppressed peoples. We have nothing to lose but our chains, and a world to win.
Austin Cole is a graduate student in City Planning and Business Administration. He is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace, the MIT Graduate Student Union-UE Local 256, the MIT Black Graduate Student Association, and BLM Boston.
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[1] Burton, Orisanmi. Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (2023), Pg 63-68
[2]ibid, Pg 111-112
[3] “MANIFESTO: The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Depression Platform, 1971.” Published in Black Agenda Report, 18 Aug 2021. https://blackagendareport.com/manifesto-attica-liberation-faction-manifesto-demands-and-anti-depression-platform-1971
[4]Burton, Orisanmi. Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (2023), Pg 155-57
[5] Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective. “The Guardian Letter: The Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective Responds,” published in Black Agenda Report, 26 Aug 2026. https://www.blackagendareport.com/guardian-letter-anti-imperialist-scholars-collective-responds
[6] Baraka, Ajamu. “A People(s)-Centered Human Rights Critique of “An Open Letter to Iran’s Political Prisoners,” published in Black Agenda Report, 26 Aug 2026. https://blackagendareport.com/peoples-centered-human-rights-critique-open-letter-irans-political-prisoners
[7] Jackson, George. Blood in My Eye (1971).
[8] Baraka, Ajamu. “A People(s)-Centered Human Rights Critique of “An Open Letter to Iran’s Political Prisoners,” published in Black Agenda Report, 26 Aug 2026.
[9] Burton, Orisanmi. Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (2023)consciousness-building.
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