George Jackson’s declaration that revolution in a modern industrial capitalist society can only mean the overthrow of all existing property relations draws one of the sharpest lines in revolutionary thought: the line between revolution and reform. The passage appears in Blood in My Eye, the book he completed in San Quentin shortly before he was killed in August 1971 and which was published after his death. In it Jackson set out a Marxist-Leninist analysis of the United States as a fascist state in the making. In his view the prisons, the police, and the courts all served one purpose: protecting the property and power of a ruling class built on the exploitation of working and colonized peoples.

For Jackson, the root of oppression lay not in bad leaders or unjust laws but in the ownership of the means of production by a small class that profits from the labor and suffering of the many. A movement that left those property relations intact, however militant its language, would leave the system of exploitation standing. He warned that reforms could be absorbed by the system and used to buy off resistance, and he called for a revolution that would transform the economic foundations of society and every institution built to protect them. His thinking drew on Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Fanon, and on the lived experience of a man caged for most of his life by the state he was analyzing.

Jackson wrote these words as a prisoner, a member of the Black Panther Party, and a co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family, and he paid for them with his life. They remain a challenge to every movement to look beyond surface changes to the structure underneath and to measure its demands against the question he posed: does this change who owns and controls society, or does it leave the system intact? Anything less, he insisted, is reform.

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