On The Front Lines: Lorenzo KomBoa Ervin From The Peak vol 103, issue 9, November 01 1999. Social activism in Canada at the onset of the new millennium is viewed by many with chagrin. Despite the growing seriousness of social problems such as unemployment, homelessness (apparently over 100,000 in Canada alone), child poverty and the alarmingly high rates of incarceration, "taking to the streets" in protest is not viewed as a serious option. The reasons for this are complex and varied, but a few stand out above the others. The present faith in capitalism as the only system compatible with human nature (a belief in the innate greed of human beings is largely accepted by everyone - save the cognitive scientists, who might respect the mysteriousness of the origins of human nature), and the related belief that the present system can be reformed and doctored to appear almost humane, preclude any serious efforts to undermine it. Bring your concerns forward and leave the tinkering to the experts, one might say. In addition, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the politically and morally ambiguous positions of The People's Republic of China and of Cuba have provided fodder for arguments accepting capitalism as the best possible system. Still, the argument has not been definitively made - or even adequately made - for the superiority of our often glorified economic system. The question to be asked, then, should be whether or not years of social and economic tinkering and capitalist apologetics have offered citizens of the free world more, at the end of the day, than complacency. In 1966, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy described the economic system in their book Monopoly Capital, as follows: "Idle men and idle machines coexist with deprivation at home and starvation abroad, that poverty grows in step with affluence, that enormous amounts of resources are wasted in frivolous and often harmful ways, that the United States has become the symbol and defender of reaction all over the world, that we are engaged in several wars and clearly headed toward more and bigger ones - the knowledge of all this, and much more, did not come to us from the social sciences but from the observation of unavoidable facts. One can even say that social scientists, assuring us for so long that all was for the best in what they took to be the best of all possible worlds, did what they could to keep us from looking reality in the face." These words could have been written today, and speak, more than ever, to the need for a new type of activism - one which strikes at the core of our society. Lorenzo KomBoa Ervin, an American social activist, former member of both the Student NonViolent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party, will be speaking at SFU on November 3. Mr. Ervin is on the front lines of many battles, such as the fight against the prison system, police brutality and racism. Not only is he part of the battle, but he has apparently also been one of the many casualties. He has spent 15 years in prison due to his affiliation with the Panthers, and is currently fighting a charge launched against him in his home town of Chattanooga, Tennessee, for his participation in a rally against police brutality. I was able to speak with Mr. Ervin while he was in Calgary to ask him about his political beliefs and affiliations, and the purpose of his current speaking tour. Although Mr. Ervin was up until 2 a.m. the night before meeting with Chuck D after the Public Enemy concert in Calgary, I was still granted an interview. Anyone familiar with the Black Panther Party and their place in the history of the United States is aware of the fact that their movement was feared, and eventually smashed, by the United States government. But yes, it's also true that the Black Panthers were a militant organization who preached revolution as opposed to reform, and attempted to assert their right to self-determination by any means necessary. Thus, they were an obvious threat to the power structure and the system that supported it. According to the typical liberal attitude towards gun control - namely, that there ought to be lots of it - the militant component of the Panther agenda was, and is, viewed with ambivalence. Yet, thanks to the improved perspective hindsight offers, any reasonable person may see that the basic human rights that the Panthers were fighting for were crucial, perhaps even worth attaining "through the barrel of a gun." But, as stated above, poverty, brutality at the hands of the police, ridiculous and inhumane prison sentences, and more are not merely historical facts for the United States and beyond. They are current realities. Ervin's recent participation in a rally against police brutality, which followed the alleged shooting deaths of two young men, on separate occasions, at the hands of the police, caused him to be charged with "incitement to riot," which means two to seven years in prison. But, as the District Attorney planned to charge him under the "three strikes and you're out" law, a conviction would have meant life in prison. Fortunately, international and local pressure caused the authorities to drop the original charge, and he now faces the lesser charge of "disrupting a meeting," which calls for six to eight months. He and two other activists, named "The Chattanooga Three" all face these charges. According to Ervin, these shooting deaths are the 37th and 38th at the hands of the local police in the past 20 years in Chattanooga, a city with a population of only 170, 000. While on this speaking tour, Ervin was also imprisoned in Australia when an openly racist politician, Pauline Hanson, claimed that he had entered the country illegally and intended to incite the aborigines to guerilla warfare. According to Ervin, these "preposterous claims . . . created such hysteria that . . . the sitting Prime Minister had to respond in some sort of way." The Prime Minister proceeded to arrest Mr. Ervin without any kind of hearing. While in prison, Ervin also says that he was beaten by the prison guards. Shortly after bringing the matter before the Australian Supreme Court, however, he was released. Clearly, political suppression through imprisonment and police brutality have been, and continue to be, a part of Lorenzo Ervin's experience as an activist. Yet not only are these the experiences of activists, but also of more and more ordinary Americans as incarceration rates climb and political platforms are increasingly based on prison construction and the death penalty. And it's working - currently, California has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Ervin also cites a shocking figure, care of the former Attorney General under Reagan, that upwards of 2,000 people have been killed by the police every year since 1968. "That's like war - and it is a war, and the majority of those people were unarmed," Ervin added. How do these realities relate to our present social system? For Ervin, they are inherent to the system in which we live. It is for this reason that Ervin advocates fundamental and revolutionary social change. "I'm in favour of fundamental social change. I think that we've seen thirty, thirty-five years of reform, but we've seen a deepening of many social problems in this period that are not being addressed . . . homelessness and so many other things that can't be addressed through anything other than a total revamping of the system." Yet despite our frustrations with the present system, Ervin acknowledges that in many ways people feel a dependence on our less than ideal institutions, such as the police. For example, even though you may feel that the police are dirty and corrupt, you'll call them when your husband is being attacked. For this reason, alternative conceptions of society have to pose real alternatives to concrete problems. "There's no alternative - as long as there's no alternative being offered. People have nowhere to go in terms of removing [the police] from the community. There are social problems there also and they see that if the police weren't there that the social problems would even be worse. Many people see this. "I've always said that one of the alternatives, or any type of grass roots organizing has to be able to deal with those questions - what about the police? They're committing acts of brutality and corruption and so forth. What are we going to do about them? We need them. Those . . . are certainly legitimate issues, and if we're talking about an alternative society we have to be able to talk about an alternative to an institution such as the police and the de-stabilization that the government creates by, [first], assigning the police to the black community and other communities, and [second], the kind of poverty and other kinds of things that the lead to the necessity of the police." These issues relate to the frustration that Ervin has with some radical movements of the left. When discussing his former Marxism when in the Black Panther Party and his current affiliations with the anarchist movement, he explained the distance between the Panthers and other radical organizations. According to Ervin, in the Black Panther Party, "the ideology of Marxism [was not] important as much as working in the community. The Black Panther Party was an organization of organizers who came into existence first and foremost as an organization fighting police brutality . . . Their thing was to do community-based organizing opposing police brutality, racism and to try to create a radical force in America, regardless of race, that would eventually change the entire structure of the government." Similarly, he describes his current anarchism as an attraction to the "emphasis on individual as well as collective rights," and its ability to "[provide] a means of freedom for the human being . . . [answering] some really serious and basic questions about the human rights of people." In speaking of the left today, Ervin contrasts his position, saying that all too often, "all they've got is ideology to fall back to," and are disconnected from the communities to which they attempt to speak. Indeed, the Panthers were involved in projects like getting traffic lights erected on dangerous corners, initiating hot lunch programs in elementary schools, and testing people for the blood disease sickle cell anemia. Ervin's experiences in prison also reinforces his affinity for anarchism. He describes the transformation of his political beliefs while in prison, saying that, "[prison] made me an anti-authoritarian. I don't believe in this idea of personal leadership and so forth and only that's going to make a revolution - or that we should follow blindly behind people . . . there were many mistakes made by the leadership Black Panther party that made it much more possible for the government to smash it and destabilize it." He continues, "I've learned that we [can't] depend on individual leadership of any sort rather than depending on the mass of people in the community. [An organization must] do community based organizing around issues effecting people - bread and butter issues, rather than just having so called radical events. I really disagree with the left on a lot of these issues." Yet how can the movement proceed when so many of the disgruntled are in prison? Ervin sees in this fact more fire for the revolutionary movement. "It should push the envelope that much further. [It is] much more serious for people to understand that the government is resorting to measures such as mass imprisonment of the youth - especially Black youth and Latino youth and police pick ups and sweeps - as a deliberate measure of state terrorism. They should understand that." When will social change occur? Ervin is hopeful: "The government knows that people are not going to accept their lot that much longer." 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