George Jackson’s Perfect Disorder

The goal of this essay is to situate the radical George Jackson’s views on violence within his political thought and practice, with particular attention to his position as an incarcerated witness indicted by a legal system he would not recognize. The first section sketches Jackson’s analysis of what he called a “captive society”: a fascist global and American arrangement that classifies and criminalizes black, brown, and poor life. In the second section I explore what Jackson advocated as a mode of revolutionary becoming whereby the captive channel their energies: inward, to form bonds of intimacy and intercommunal solidarity, and outward, to break the bonds of law and order politics with the “perfect disorder” of disciplined and yet spontaneous guerilla violence. This idea of “channeling” distinguishes Jackson’s self-fashioning from redemptive forms of violence and testimony that isolate individuals and their actions. As I consider in the conclusion, Jackson’s legacy nonetheless reveals the varied ways his advocacy for revolutionary love and violence waned in the hands of his inheritors – and how incarcerated activists uphold his ideas today.