On Aug. 17, Hope Packages organizers and volunteers congregated in the Liberation Center’s common area, just as they do on the third Saturday of every month. While HP regularly collaborates with other organizations and supports other projects, to commemorate Black August they spoke with New Afrikan Political Prisoner, Shaka A. Shakur, from Buckingham “Correctional” Facility in Virginia.
The conversation centered around the role of “dual power” and the role it has and can play in larger revolutionary processes. By framing the dialogue, Shaka also clarified why Hope Packages describes itself as a political direct-aid program:
“A lot of people talk about socialism, revolution, and so forth. Sometimes its rhetoric, sometimes its in the abstract, right? But what do we really mean when we out here organizing, struggling, planning, and so forth: What is the vision? Do we have a vision for how these actual things come into play, and what kinds of infrastructure and institutions we want to create.”
Dual power is when we empower ourselves to use the resources we have and those we can gather to create alternative structures of the support. By doing so, we not only demonstrate how we are already the ones who make our communities run, but also continue to cultivate relationships and trust with a broad base of people upon whom any larger social transformation depends.
In short, as an institution of dual power, Hope Packages is neither an end or merely a means to an end; it is both. When we collect donations and supplies, assemble the kits and build community, distribute the packages and meet with people, we are providing aid and creating an independent, autonomous form of support. We can’t end there, however. With a vision, like the one HP articulates in their 10-Point Program, every person who donates, volunteers, and receives Hope Packages helps build a base of support for when social tensions start boiling over and the masses take to the streets.
Before they continued the discussion while preparing their kits, HP volunteers—following the lead of co-founder Doris Jones—sang “Happy Birthday” to Shaka Shakur who, despite serving the entirety of his sentence, spent another holiday in prison two days later.
Despite their best efforts over the past two decades, the state has not been successful in diminishing Shaka’s organizing efforts nor his revolutionary optimism. From behind enemy lines, he advised all HP volunteers and all organizers to disregard
“the naysayers making claims about what people are not gonna do, what people are not gonna support, how we can’t win, blah blah blah… The systems do everything in their power to keep us from one another, so obviously they know something that we might not know: that we can win.”
We can win freedom for all, and you can help free Shaka Shakur now by sending a letter to the Lake County Prosecutor’s Office. If Shaka is able to provide so much guidance from a prison across the country, imagine how much he could contribute to the betterment of our communities if he were released.
Free Shaka Shakur and all political prisoners!
