When we first conceived of this issue’s theme, we did not expect that, by the time we were in the final stage of editing, the US would kidnap Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores from Venezuela and then launch its war upon the people of Iran. These events were, of course, foreseeable since the current fascistic Trump regime began this term with a belligerence towards the hypocritical “rules-based” international order, a game that previous iterations of imperialism liked to play with the world it has dominated. The Trump-style “mask off” imperialism is such that all forms of violent intervention and unilateralism are foreseeable. But since all such forms are foreseeable, it is hard to know which ones to expect––who will be bombed next, who will be kidnapped, what populations will be rounded up––months before they manifest. Hence, just as we did not expect an open genocide to be launched on October 2023 by an equally belligerent settler-capitalist power when we were putting together our first issue of Material, events again got ahead of our planned content.
Even still, the theme of this issue––the political prisoner––is relevant to the current conjuncture and will remain relevant for as long as capitalism dominates the globe. A particular dialectic of political prisoners and the politics of imprisonment is essential to the reproduction of capitalism. To paraphrase Lenin: “One class in power and another in prison.” As long as there are political classes and struggle between classes there will be prisons, and the class in command will determine the rules of imprisonment.
Resistance to capitalism and imperialism will always generate political prisoners—too many to count still languish behind bars. Moreover, the particular nature of the capitalist state will dictate the nature of incarceration: what populations will be targeted with criminalization, the very laws that decide what counts as crime in the first place. Imprisonment is always political, as the violent expansion of ICE raids and arrests the Trump administration unleashed upon its own population have demonstrated—as does the kangaroo court proceedings within which Maduro is caught.
Moreover, when we look at the current actions of the US and Israel in Western Asia, it is tempting to condemn them as criminals guilty of war crimes. While this condemnation may be descriptively true based on vague notions of international law,1 it is also true that this law has largely existed as a balancing between imperialist siblings, a veneer of liberal moralizing no less violent than Kipling’s rapturous poetics about the “white man’s burden” of British Empire.2 Even when this supposed moral order was venerated, the imperialist powers always found ways to exempt themselves and their allies whenever their morality was called into question. They definitely did so when Israel launched its latest instance of open genocide in Gaza, often in the language of international law (“Israel has a right to exist!”). So who will charge and imprison those guilty of war crimes––of obliterating humans and their history, of genocide, of demanding that the entire world bend to an apocalyptic vision––when the guilty are those who determine what counts as a crime in the first place? That is, the desire to condemn the US or Israel as “criminal” for their actions in Western Asia is shattered by the reality that what is “criminal” is a matter of law, and what is law is a matter of politics. The point, here, is that we are on the side of a particular kind of criminality because our politics and the subject of our politics––the exploited, the oppressed––are criminalized. One class in power, another in prison.
This issue of Material begins with an interview with Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, “We have no choice but to navigate against all odds.” As many of our readers are aware, Abdallah is a former Lebanese political prisoner held in France from 1984 to 2025 for his revolutionary activity with the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction (LARF). After many years of solidarity activism on his behalf, Abdallah was finally released from prison in July 2025 and immediately deported to Lebanon. We are honored that he agreed to be interviewed for this issue.
Next, we have the article “Ibon man may layang luminad: Political imprisonment and lawfare in the Philippines”3 by Karapatan, a collective interview with International Red Aid and Samidoun Île-de-France, and a contribution from the Secretariat of the International Red Aid. These pieces provide an important window on the international situation of political prisoners and the ways in which law is wielded to incarcerate and criminalize enemies of the state.
Following the above pieces, “Political Prisoners, Lawfare, and the Revolutionary Response in the US” by Comrade B, the General Secretary of Lal Morich, outlines the structure of carceral logic in the US––the deep institutional roots of racial and carceral capitalism––of which the current ICE raids are a recent symptom. The US possesses the largest prison population in the history of humanity; this is not a bug, but a feature of its status as the current leader of world capitalism.
N. Ravi’s “Conditions and Rights in Jails: My Experiences” is about India’s carceral system, particularly in Jharkhand, that exposes the political elements of imprisonment. Ravi is a revolutionary activist who has been in and out of this carceral system and thus possesses personal experience with the prison conditions.
In our “From the Archives” section, a space where we provide material from our revolutionary past, we have some selections from Rosa Luxemburg’s “Letters from Prison.” The incarceration of the anti-capitalist militant has been an intrinsic part of capitalism since its inception; many of the “great names” of the historical revolutionary movement have spent time imprisoned and writing from the space of incarceration. We had a lot of options to choose from but felt that it was important to give our respect to Luxemburg, who also wrote her famous Junius Pamphlet from prison, which argued for a rupture from social democracy and the practice of supporting national imperialist interests, relevant to today’s conjuncture where some “leftists” are again suggesting that we support an imperialist intervention in Iran.
Finally, we have two texts concerning film criticism in the Philippines. The first, “Cinema Against Confinement: The Political Prisoner in Selected Filipino Film Productions (1984–1995)” is a review by the militant and acclaimed film scholar Epoy Deyto that examines the depiction and analysis of the figure of the political prisoner in regional cinema. The second text, “Regulated Filmmakers, Deregulated Film Industry: Some Problems in the Philippine Film Industry and their Solution” by A. Hunt examines the role of film and the film industry in the region, the notion of “independent” film, and the possibility of revolutionary film, using and expanding on work by Deyto.
Our art in this issue is by the Palestinian artist Rehab Nazzal from her Dead Sea Series (2012) and her We the Wild Plants and Fruit Trees (2022). Nazzal is a long-time political activist whose work deals with the settler-colonial violence on the bodies, landscape, and culture of her people. The work from the former series concerns the fact that the Dead Sea is invisible from the Palestinian side due to the colonial imprisonment of the people by the Zionist Entity. The work from the latter concerns the erasure of the Palestinian Indigenous relationship to the land.
Thanks again to our readers and supporters. Solidarity with all incarcerated militants who challenged capitalism in the hope of a better and more humane world; solidarity with all of the oppressed and exploited victimized by criminalization and incarceration.
D. Jin
J. Moufawad-Paul
M. Van Herzeele
- Moreover, in the past decade it has become increasingly obvious that even bourgeois structures like the UN and the Hague have become completely meaningless.
- Rudyard Kipling’s infamous poem, White Man’s Burden (1899), argues that the British Empire’s “burden” is to bring civilization to the non-white peoples and nations through colonialism. The notion of Empire expressed in that poem was a reflection of how British imperialists had for a long time justified their empire.
- “Even birds have the freedom to fly.”