UniversalMonk

May have been written today. The more things change, the more things stay the same!

Chicago, February 27, 1934

Dear Carl: Your letter of February 13 was quite a surprise and illuminating, to learn that you had arrived at the same conclusions that I had some years ago: that is, that Anarchism has not produced any organized ability in the present generation, only a few little loose, struggling groups, scattered over this vast country, that come together in “conferences” occasionally, talk to each other, then go home. Then we never hear from them again until another conference is held.

Do you call this a movement? You speak of “the movement” in your letter. Where is it? You say, “I just feel disgusted.” I have been for a long time.

Anarchists are good at showing the shortcomings of others’ organizations. But what have they done in the last fifty years, you say. Nothing to build up a movement; they are mere pipe-dreamers dreaming.

Consequently, Anarchism doesn’t appeal to the public. This busy, practical world cares nothing for fine-spun theories—they want facts, and too, they want a few examples shown.

They talk about cooperation. You state that you have been trying to get the four little excuses for papers to cooperate to get out one worthwhile publication, but you can’t succeed. . . .

Anarchism is a dead issue in American life today. Radicalism has been blotted off the map of Europe. The Vienna horror-slaughter is too shocking to realize. The worker is a mere appendage to the capitalist factory. Machinery has eliminated him. Robert Burns said: “O God, that men should be so cheap, and bread should be so dear!”

Radicalism is at a low ebb today. We are living in strange times! Despotism is on horseback, riding at high speed. The worker is helpless; he has no voice in his mode or method of life—he just floats along on the tides of ill times.

I went to work for the International Labor Defense (ILD) because I wanted to do a little something to help defend the victims of capitalism who got into trouble, and not always be talking, talking, talking. When the little work that is now being doled out [is finally doled out], what then?

As ever, fraternally, yours

Lucy E. Parsons

Great article on how people are helping prisoners solve advanced math problems in prison. Inspiring.

Math is giving meaning to many behind bars. So ya don't have to deal with paywall:

Pioneering Advanced Math from Behind Bars

Math research gives meaning to years spent in prison

By Amory Tillinghast-Raby Edited by Madhusree Mukerjee

Three years ago Christopher Havens, serving a prison sentence of more than two decades for murder, published a discovery in number theory from his cell. Havens and three co-authors showed that a significant class of fractions often maintains a regular structure after being transformed algebraically. Remarkably, Havens had no access to computers, which are typically used for such calculations. Instead, he painstakingly pieced his research together by hand.

Now, a nonprofit co-founded by Havens has developed a computational programming platform using one of the few technologies accessible in prison: highly restricted, text-only email. As this new facility offers more opportunities, more incarcerated individuals are diving into advanced mathematics to give meaning to their time behind bars.

Havens, who dropped out of high school as a sophomore, began his math journey in solitary confinement. "It brings out the worst in a lot of people," he says. "Right above you, you’ve got this fluorescent light that never shuts off, not even to sleep. You’ve got these guys screaming. You have people kicking the wall." To escape, Havens began solving math puzzles—first Sudoku, then packets of algebra problems slipped under his door. "I would get lost in it for days," he says. "I would dream about it." By the time he left solitary, Havens was deep into calculus and venturing into number theory, which he would later publish in.

However, teaching yourself mathematics in prison means getting stuck—not just on a problem, but on how to find the solution. "Imagine you don’t have a professor," says James Conway III, studying measure theory from Ohio’s death row. "You’re on your own." After being released from solitary, Havens wrote to a journal at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, asking for a mathematician to correspond with. Months later, researchers from Turin, Italy, responded. Their first question: How is a continued fraction transformed by the operation (af + b) / (cf + d)?

Continued fractions are like mathematical matryoshka dolls, one inside the next, and Havens calculated formulas for specific transformations in these fractions—handwritten on notebook pages that covered his cell. "It took over two years to do the math," Havens says.

For those incarcerated, the days of solving 21st-century problems with pen and paper might soon be numbered. The Prison Mathematics Project (PMP), co-founded by Havens, is helping others in prison study mathematics. With mentorship in topics like combinatorics and abstract algebra, the project has paired 171 incarcerated individuals in 27 states with mentors. One participant, Travis Cunningham, is preparing to submit research on mathematical physics for publication. The project has developed a system to let inmates write computer programs using the prison's text-only email system.

The PMP Console acts as a relay. Inmates email their code to the console, a cloud-based system runs the program in isolation, and the results are returned. Havens has already tested this system with Carsten Elsner, a mathematician at the University of Applied Sciences for Economics in Hannover, Germany. They are working on Zopf, a continued fraction with a specific sequence of integers. Havens and Elsner hope to prove that calculating the greatest common factor among these fractions forms a twisting pattern.

But Zopf also has a symbolic meaning. In German folklore, a nobleman escapes a swamp by lifting himself with his braid. "Zopf" translates to "braid," and the name captures Havens’s own journey. Mathematics, he says, "lifted me out of the swamp."

Although the PMP Console has potential, obstacles remain. Sending an email can cost up to 50 cents, while inmates earn just 52 cents per hour. And some prisons have rules that prevent the sending of "encoded" messages, including computer code. Securus Technologies, a major prison e-mail provider, is reviewing the possibility of incorporating the PMP Console into its education platform.

Despite challenges, the PMP is not just a tech project. It's an opportunity for prisoners to rebuild their lives through mathematics. "Until I started studying math, my life had just been chaos and destruction," Cunningham says. "When I got my first text on partial differential equations, I learned what love is."

For Havens, this transformation is the essence of justice. "Justice happens when you begin to fix what led you to prison in the first place," he says. Though some debts may never be fully paid, more and more people in prison are turning to mathematics to escape their own swamps.