RIP prole-cat

My condolences about losing your comrade.

Condolences to you and all his friends and family. Really sad news xxx

Shit. I hate these constant reminders of my own mortality. I grieve.

David in Atlanta

Recently our comrade Don Jennings aka prole-cat was found in his home dead and so far we have not heard how he died. Don was a steadfast fighter for justice, a prolific writer, a founding member of Atlanta's Capital Terminus Collective, former member of Workers Solidarity Alliance, a student of life, adventurer, philosopher, loyal friend and companion to many and a true mensch. May his memory remain to encourage us in our struggles to create a better, more beautiful world. RIP dear comrade.

My will is easy to decide
For there is nothing to divide
My kin don’t need to fuss and moan
“Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.”
My body? – Oh. – If I could choose
I would to ashes it reduce
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow
Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again
This is my Last and final Will
Good Luck to All of you

sorry to hear that :( condolences

Condolences comrade, all the best to the friends and family.

I am sorry to hear that.

Thanks for posting this David. I only heard about this earlier tonight, I'm really glad one of our comrades made sure to talk to me on the phone about it, before I saw it here.

Don was one of the first people that I was ever able to call "Comrade", and he was not only one of the most dedicated people I've ever met, but also an incredibly nice and warm person. I plan to write something more substantive about him in the next few days, and several of his comrades are going to work to collect his writings, etc.

This is really a loss, and should remind us not to take our time here, or our political and ethical commitments, for granted.

I am sorry to hear of this loss to our movement and the sadness this brings to his friends and family.
Love Jason.

sorry to hear about this. RIP

It's tragic to hear of a death of a comrade.
In solidarity and respect.
Dan.

very sad ... moege die Erde dir leicht sein!

that's terrible, david, my condolences

he was also in LCF until very recently, we will be putting up his interview with bell hooks as soon as possible.

rip

I corresponded with Don when he started to get active. Met him in Washington, DC at the "Million Worker March" and hung together for a bit with him there.

I liked him on a personal level and am saddend to learn about his death.

I'm very sorry, condolences David, Oliver and everyone else who knew him.

Oliver or anyone else we would happily host an obituary or writings here if you like.

Obituary on commonstruggle.org

Includes 17 of his articles published by North Eastern Anarchist, Anarkismo.Net, The Dawn, etc...

Yes Oliver the plan is that those of us in atlanta will compile his political writings and his fictional writings and publish them. we're going to have to get permission from his family for his fictional works .. i am going to ask his family about the novel he was writing as well, even if just to read what he had written so far.

I had the pleasure of meeting him once, when I lived in Kentucky. It was hard to get the phone call from a friend out there last week. His daughter is only 12.

RIP, condolences to those who knew him

It is always a shocker when one of "us" falls, no matter what. That has certainly been the effect on those in our group I mentioned it to, as these things almost always are.

Our best to his family, and day-to-day comrades. I guess we all just hike our boots up and keep going, as that would, among all the other things it would do, honour his memory. RiP, Prolecat.

Sad. condolences to all the comrades and friends.

There are large parts of the American South in which anyone who questions the Iraq war, or thinks that women should decide what to do with their own body, is considered to be radical, on the extreme edge of any kind of acceptable politics.

Don never accepted these limits, and never pretended that he was anything less than a revolutionary anarchist. Nor did he take the other easy path, to remove himself from this climate, to get sucked into the internet or to move away and pretend he wasn't a Southerner. His outlook on life was radical without apologies, but it was also rooted in the culture that he grew up in, as ugly as parts of that culture are.

I met Don in the summer of 2004. Until then I'd been very interested in anarchism, but was young and inexperienced. Don had been active in Earth First! in Kentucky, where he'd worked with a solitary trotskyist to try to raise a class-struggle perspective, but I believe that he had never actually come face-to-face with another anarchist until some mutual internet contacts put us in touch when he moved back to North Georgia.

I don't remember how late I was leaving the sandwich shop where I worked to meet him, but I remember worrying that he'd be angry. He was leaning against the side of his pick-up truck, and with a thick mustache and a thicker southern accent, he just smiled, waved my anxiety away, and reassured me that he was well-acquainted with the difficulties in the life of a wage slave.

This generosity of spirit was something that he always maintained. Don was one of the founders of the Capital Terminus Collective, a class-struggle anarchist group whose name was a play on Atlanta's original name of Terminus City, and he never hesitated to make the multi-hour trek for our meetings or to join us in protests. Although all of the members financed the collective, most of us were young and/or broke; Don gave generously, and always made it clear that he wanted to avoid having any extra input because of that.

The small number of radicals in Georgia made it very hard to be sectarian, since protests and public events were so miniscule that active radicals and leftists couldn't avoid each other. Nevertheless, Don's attitude was always an example that the rest of us would have done well to follow. He was comfortable discussing, debating, and even working alongside everybody, from Trotskyists and Maoists to Kucinich-type democrats. He gave much more weight to how people acted than on how perfectly their politics squared up with his on paper.

It wasn't just in his social attitude that he combined firm political convictions with a repulsion for dogmas. I'm not sure if Don ever went to college, but he is without a doubt one of the most intellectually disciplined comrades I've ever had. I remember borrowing a history of platformist anarchism from him, which was stuffed almost to bursting with pages upon pages of notes. At around the same time, he tried to introduce me to topics as diverse as Marxist analyses of American reconstruction or to Trotsky's explanation for the rise of fascism in Germany. I wish now that I'd taken more of a cue from him to explore these topics back then, rather than letting them collect dust in the back of my mind.

His non-dogmatic attitude also applied to the southern culture around him. He distinguished the manifestations of bigotry and religious zealotry that have become the stereotype for this culture, from Southern culture as a whole. During CTC's first trip to an anti-war protest in Washington – at a time when the entire collective could still fit in his pick-up – he brought out his dulcimer. He loved to go to bluegrass festivals, he said, and he didn't mind the ubiquitous religious-themed music at all, as long as the music came before the religious theme. What bothered him were those who just saw music as a vehicle for their propaganda. (I imagine that he had the same attitude towards political music.) Strumming a tune, he whined out the refrain of a whimsical but pointed satire: “Let us sing through our noses about Jesus...”

Don always tried to maintain a balance between practical activity and theoretical reflection. One of his most original pieces, and probably his most controversial, was called “Anarchism and Confederate-Flag Culture: One Man's Journey from Southern Heritage to Libertarian Socialism.” The Southern “rebel” culture is a deep-rooted phenomenon, and most American radicals hesitate between pretending it doesn't exist or echoing the dominant rejection of everything southern, without trying to examine the material and cultural causes. There is a palpable feeling in the US that even the southern accent is somehow reactionary and backwards, and when radicals parrot this stance, it only makes it harder to discuss their ideas in the south. Whether one agrees with everything that Don wrote or not, the discussion that he tried to start is an incredibly important one, and should be continued. At least as important is his attitude as a writer. He was never pedantic, never too abstract or theoretical – it was always clear that he was writing from practical experience, and he worked hard to make his prose crystal clear:

“If you are someone who displays a Confederate flag out of overt racism, this text is not for you. In fact, we will fight you in the streets. If, however, you are someone who insists that he is not racist, but you have at some point in your life displayed a Confederate Flag out of a general sense of rebellion against the government, the boss, parents, pompous Yankee liberals, or just against modern society in general, then this text is addressed to you. […] By painting slavery and racism as a uniquely southern phenomenon, the CEO’s manage to divert attention from the racist legacy that remains. When they falsely imply that racism is uniquely southern, and then correctly add that the racial situation in the south now mirrors that of the rest of the country, they declare the problem solved. Implicitly this has the effect of encouraging such reactionary nonsense as charges of “reverse discrimination.” […] These facts are what the “racism is a southern thing” myth is intended to obscure. Blacks, Latinos, and to a lesser extent, working-class southern whites are all harmed by this myth. It is time to place the responsibility for American racism and poverty squarely where it belongs, at the doorstep of the business class, and at the foot of the American flag (and all other Anglo-nationalist flags) which provide the business class with aid and comfort.”

Don's lively, conversational style should serve as a model for any of us who want to write for anyone outside of our anarchist clubhouses. It should be no surprise that he also nurtured a passion for creative writing. A blog called “Gnarled Oak, Knotty Pine” (oaknpine.blogspot.com), with the characteristic subtitle, “some random lyricism about working class life in Appalachia and the Deep South”, contains a lot of his more recent writing.

Don's life stands out as a shining example of a worker-intellectual. He never tried to erase his roots, nor was he ever content to stop trying to sharpen his mind and put his radical politics into practice. He was a large-hearted and dedicated friend and comrade, an example which I can only hope will serve as a model for many in the future.

Don Jennings, ¡presente!

i just learned that this is 'randy' who used to post here. a sorry thing in any event, but it was tougher after i realized that. r.i.p. he leaves children, i understand.

It is always terribly difficult when someone you know passes away but those who knew Don should be proud to have known someone who clearly made a difference in many people's lives.

Very sad to hear. Was he a Kentucky native? I feel I'm discovering there are more interesting people living here than I realized

If i remember correctly Don was an Alabama native who lived in Georgia and Kentucky at various times in his life.

Farewell dearest comrade farewell until I hear the strum of your dulcimer in the wind farewell.

http://libcom.org/library/hurricane-katrina-and-good-churchgoers-u-s-south-prole-cat

I don't think this was posted up earlier. It's a great piece, and a quiet testament to Don's courage and ethical commitment. When Katrina hit, he immediately did what he could to help people (as did many others) and only later worried about trying to draw out the lessons.