Bill Dunne

From Infoshop OpenWiki

"I was made a prisoner of the state on October 14, 1979 in Seattle, Washington. Late that evening, I was picked up by paramedics while under the influence of police bullets near a shot-up and wrecked car containing some weapons and a dead jail escapee.

According to the ensuing state and federal charges, I and a codefendant and unknown other associates of a San Francisco anarchist collective had conspired to effect a comrade’s armed liberation from a Seattle jail and attempted to execute the plot on October 14, 1979. The charges further alleged the operation was financed by bank expropriation and materially facilitated by illegal acquisition of weapons, explosives, vehicles, ID and other equipment.

After long subjection to atrocious jail conditions and three sensationalized trials, I got a 90 year sentence in 1980. I subsequently got a consecutive 15 years as a result of an attempted self-emancipation in 1983. The aggregate 105 years is a “parole when they feel like it” sort of sentence.

I have no confidence in the American system of purported justice. It is designed to protect and advance the interests of the ruling class and is operated by people who identify much more with that class than with mine. Rarely, however, may this complicated social system’s procedures be exploited by the people they are intended to suppress. Accordingly, I have contested my imprisonment legally, and recently filed another challenge. Contrary to applicable law, my federal conspiracy prosecution constituted double jeopardy, secret government information was used in imposing the sentence, and the written sentence is 50 years longer than the controlling oral sentence. That challenge languishes in federal court in Seattle.

My political motivation is without reservation radical left up to and including the left of people’s revolution by any means necessary. I know of no single ideology whose name adequately defines my politics. The names traditionally associated with left formations (anarchist, communist, socialist, etc.) have become too vague and diffuse to be sufficiently defining. They have been tied to such a wide array of failed sects and moribund social organizations that it is impossible to know if they offer the solutions requisite to real world revolution. Clarity is important in political interchange. If seeking it requires avoiding easy nomenclature that might carry unintended baggage and necessitates inconveniently long explanations, so be it.

I cannot define as an anarchist because while the ultimate end of all left struggle is the anarcho-communism the withering of the state will leave, the many anarchisms lack the structure to get from here to there. Nevertheless, I recognize the value of anarchy’s contributions in promoting local autonomy, rejecting excessive hierarchy, and incorporating a broader spectrum of human activity into political consciousness.

I cannot define as a communist because the structures that have grown out of communist thought have been too prone to authoritarian deformations and rigidity, and the many communisms lack the flexibility to resist pressure in those directions. Yet I nevertheless recognize Marx, Lenin, Che and other communists as high on the list of contributors to liberating theory and practice.

Neither do I define as a socialist because that can mean virtually anything from national socialist fascism leftward. I nevertheless recognize the present objective of revolutionary struggle as a world socialism in the most radically left sense where all people have the greatest possible freedom to develop their full human potential. The pursuit of material, political and social equality on every level is close to my core.

I am a collectivist, long having recognized that in numbers there is strength and capability and security and satisfaction. There is more humanity in cooperation than in isolation. I am a technician, knowing that we, the people, can create the revolutionary material and social technology that will free us. I am an advocate of both local autonomy and federated centralization, a balance ensuring the equitable distribution of power. I am a supporter of all progressive struggles against imperial capital. I am a partisan of armed and other subterranean struggle as unavoidable in furtherance of class war. Revolution is not and never will be legal. I am a prisoner of war (class war.) Class is the source and sustenance of what makes revolution necessary.

I am also happily atheist, anti-sexist, anti-racist, globalist, anti-authoritarian, environmentalist, anti-imperialist, democratic (little d). However, none of those sufficiently characterizes my politics over the others that I can define myself by any of them alone. Rather than a gaggle of competitive “identities,” my vision of the road to revolution encompasses all of them as necessarily synergistic strands we must weave into a new social fabric.

I see that road running not only through traditional forms of struggle, but also in new and innovative directions. Creating an alternative socio-economic base of collective living and working situations is one. That will help us drive past the apparatus of repression’s increasing capacity to co-opt and suppress older forms of struggle and develop our theory and practice in the process. The diverse organs of that base will grow together into a body politic of interwoven free zones, displacing ruling class institutions with our own.

My present lack of formal identification with a particular theoretical system does not prevent me from struggle. Exclusive adherence to a hard line is not necessary to finding comrades or laying down positive practice. Revolution road is not that narrow at this juncture, nor should it be. Ultimately, we of the left have a common destination: the collective to which humanity will evolve, faster or slower according to the efficacy of our work.

Toward attaining that destination, we need to cooperate in creating a new revolutionary praxis synthesizing the lessons of the past and a clear analysis of the present. With mutual struggle, we can weld the diverse elements of our side of the barricade into a powerful weapon against the depredations of imperial capital. Our overwhelming human commonality can and must make it an all people’s tool of emancipation from the class enemy that afflicts us all."

(January 12, 1998)

Around 1982, Dunne was transferred by the State of Washington to the notorious Marion Federal Prison. He spent over a decade there before transferring to USP Leavenworth. There he assisted social prisoners in both political and scholastic education. One prisoner, Ernesto Santiago received his GED (General Education Diploma) with the help of Dunne and fellow Political Prisoner Jaan Laaman. Bill Dunne was a PC member from June '96 to June '97. He is a Class War POW. In the summer of 2002, Dunne was then again transferred to the new USP Atwater in California.

This page is part of the Prison Abolition Guide.