unPoliceYourMind

Are you new to #abolition?

We made a study guide for you! 

This guide is here for you to self-organize weekly meetings for discussion with your friends, co-workers, neighbors, comrades.

Abolitionist politics is not about what is possible, but about making the impossible a reality. Ending slavery appeared to be an impossible challenge for Sojourner Truth, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and others, and yet they struggled for it anyway. Today we seek to abolish a number of seemingly immortal institutions, drawing inspiration from those who have sought the abolition of all systems of domination, exploitation, and oppression—from Jim Crow laws and prisons to patriarchy and capitalism. The shockingly unfinished character of these struggles can be seen from some basic facts about our present. The 85 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the poorest half; more African American men are in prison, jail, or parole, than were enslaved in 1850; we have altered the chemical composition of our atmosphere threatening all life on this planet; female and trans* people are significantly more likely than cisgender men to be victims of sexual and domestic violence; rich nations support military interventions into ‘developing’ countries as cover for neo-colonial resource exploitation. Recognizing that the institutions we fight against are both interconnected and unique, we refuse to take an easy path of reveling in abstract ideals while accepting mere reforms in practice. Instead, we seek to understand the specific power dynamics within and between these systems so we can make the impossible possible; so we can bring the entire monstrosity down.

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– the Abolition Collective (Kevin Bruyneel, George Ciccariello-Maher, Glen Coulthard, Andrew Dilts, Lisa Guenther, Joy James, Brian Lovato, Eli Meyerhoff, Sean Parson, H.L.T. Quan, Dylan E. Rodriguez, Jordana Rosenberg, Rashad Shabazz, Andrea Smith, Damien Sojoyner, Jasmine Yarish)

****PLZ REBLOG TO HELP SPREAD THE WORD about this new, open access, radical journal!!!****

Manifesto for Abolition

Abolitionist politics is not about what is possible, but about making the impossible a reality. Ending slavery appeared to be an impossible challenge for Sojourner Truth, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and others, and yet they struggled for it anyway. Today we seek to abolish a number of seemingly immortal institutions, drawing inspiration from those who have sought the abolition of all systems of domination, exploitation, and oppression—from Jim Crow laws and prisons to patriarchy and capitalism. The shockingly unfinished character of these struggles can be seen from some basic facts about our present. The 85 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the poorest half; more African American men are in prison, jail, or parole, than were enslaved in 1850; we have altered the chemical composition of our atmosphere threatening all life on this planet; female and trans* people are significantly more likely than cisgender men to be victims of sexual and domestic violence; rich nations support military interventions into ‘developing’ countries as cover for neo-colonial resource exploitation. Recognizing that the institutions we fight against are both interconnected and unique, we refuse to take an easy path of reveling in abstract ideals while accepting mere reforms in practice. Instead, we seek to understand the specific power dynamics within and between these systems so we can make the impossible possible; so we can bring the entire monstrosity down.

We must ask questions that are intimately connected with abolitionist movements if we are to understand these dynamics in ways that are strategically useful. How do those in power use differences of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and class to divide and exploit us? How do we build bridges across these divides through our organizing? Activists on the ground ask such questions often, but rarely do those within universities become involved. Instead, academia has more often been an opponent to abolitionist movements, going back to the co-constitution of early universities with colonialism and slavery, and the development of racial science and capitalist ideologies. Academic journals have functioned to maintain a culture of conformity, legitimated with myths of ‘political neutrality’ and ‘meritocracy.’ At the same time, colleges and universities have always been terrains of struggle, as radical organizers have found ways to expropriate their resources: from W.E.B. DuBois’s abolitionist science at Fisk University to the Black Campus Movement of the 1960s. Inspired by them, we refuse to abandon the resources of academia to those who perpetuate the status quo.

Instead, we are creating a new project, centered around Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics—for research, publishing, and study that encourage us to make the impossible possible, to seek transformation well beyond policy changes and toward revolutionary abolitionism.

Our journal’s title has multiple reference points in a tense relation with one another. ‘Abolition’ refers partly to the historical and contemporary movements that have identified themselves as ‘abolitionist’: those against slavery, prisons, the wage system, animal and earth exploitation, human trafficking, and the death penalty, among others. But we also refer to all revolutionary movements, insofar as they have abolitionist elements – whether the abolition of patriarchy, capitalism, heteronormativity, ableism, colonialism, the state, or white supremacy. Rather than just seeking to abolish a list of oppressive institutions, we aim to support studies of the entanglement of different systems of oppression, not to erase the tensions between different movements, but to create spaces for collective experimentation with those tensions. Instead of assuming one homogenous subject as our audience (e.g., “abolitionists of the world unite!”), we write for multiple, contingent, ambivalent subjectivities—for people coming from different places, living and struggling in different circumstances, and in the process of figuring out who we are and untangling these knots to fight for a more just and liberated world. With Fanon, we are “endlessly creating” ourselves.

Abolition takes cues from the abolition-democracy espoused by figures like W.E.B Du Bois, Angela Davis, and Joel Olson. Our orientation toward academic insurgency builds upon the struggles of the Black campus movement against the White University, the American Indian movement against the Colonial University, feminist and queer movements against the Hetero-Patriarchal University, and anarchist and communist movements against the Capitalist University. As efforts to revolutionize academia originated and drew their lifeblood from movements outside and across the boundaries of academic institutions, today we recognize that our journal’s radical aspirations must be similarly grounded. We must therefore facilitate collaborations of radical academics with and in support of movements that are struggling against oppressive regimes and for the creation of alternative futures. Recognizing that the best movement-relevant intellectual work is happening both in the movements themselves and in the communities with whom they organize (e.g., in dispossessed neighborhoods and prisons), the journal aims to support scholars whose research amplifies such grassroots intellectual activity.

In tension with struggles against and beyond academia, we recognize the desires of academics to survive within it, for the access to resources that inclusion can offer. Rather than accepting such desires as eternal necessities, we foresee that the success of abolitionist projects will change the availability of resources for intellectual activity as well as what we understand as a ‘resource.’ To help academics grapple with transgressing academia’s boundaries, our journal aims to provide some legitimacy within the dominant value practices of academia (e.g., publication requirements for hiring, tenure, and promotion), while simultaneously pushing the limits of those practices. All of our publications will be accessible, free, and open access, refusing the paywalls of the publishing industry. We will also produce hard-copy versions for circulation to communities lacking internet access. Yet, we are not abandoning peer review—sharing writing with respected comrades and giving each other feedback before wider circulation—which can be useful for movements to strengthen and amplify their intellectual activities. As peer review is ultimately based on relationships of trust, we ask why academics on the opposite side of our struggles are our ‘peers.’ Instead, we commit to building relationships with activist-intellectuals for whom a new kind of peer review can serve as an insurgent tool to expropriate academia’s resources for knowledge production.

‘Abolition’ as a concept, process, and reality becomes the common ground upon which we meet, struggle, and join together in solidarity.

 —- This is an initial draft of the manifesto. We welcome your feedback. – the Abolition Collective

THE ART OF DOING TIME

a monumental feat of ingenuity, will, and resourcefulness by Jesse Krimes, a 31-year-old artist from Philadelphia who stealthily made a 39-panel mural piece by piece using contraband prison sheets, hair gel, plastic spoons, and New York Times clippings while serving a 70-month jail sentence that ended last September.

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Occupy Oakland - Broken window at a Men’s Warehouse building in downtown Oakland, CA, Nov. 3, 2011

"The truth of the matter, as Marx sees, is that everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down. ‘All that is solid’ — from the clothes on our backs to the looms and mills that weave them, to the men and women who work the machines, to the houses and neighborhoods the workers live in, to the firms and corporations that exploit the workers, to the towns and cities and whole regions and even nations that embrace them all — all these are made to be broken tomorrow, smashed or shredded or pulverized or dissolved, so they can be recycled or replaced next week, and the whole process can go on again and again, hopefully forever, in ever more profitable forms. The pathos of all bourgeois monuments is that their material strength and solidity actually count for nothing and carry no weight at all, that they are blown away like frail reeds by the very forces of capitalist development that they celebrate. Even the most beautiful and impressive bourgeois buildings and public works are disposable, capitalized for fast depreciation and planned to be obsolete, closer in their social functions to tents and encampments than to ‘Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals.’”

<Another science is possible!  — Isabelle Stengers on “slow science”> "Since public research has been re-defined as “the knowledge economy ”, all critical cooperation has dissolved. Success is now measured in copyrights, but that is absolutely no measure for scientific success. Capitalism is turning against researchers and destroying them, after destroying so many others. But to promote ‘a slow science’ does not mean simply to demand “the time and freedom to raise issues that are worth it!”; It also involves researchers becoming capable of developing other links than those they have traditionally entertained with industry and the State. Even if there have always been whistle-blowers, the scientific institution has indeed promoted a mode of development that we know to be unsustainable. Researchers, as a rule, despise public opinion; they think science will provide the rational solution to society’s problems. Another science is possible. But it requires what today is to scientists a ‘waste of time’, namely re-appropriating the imagination needed to open themselves up to others’ preoccupations, to their knowledge, to their objections. We do not need scientists to inform the public better but we need scientists to be able to participate in the collective understanding of issues.”

“Capital always dreams of a perpetual motion machine, work from energy without loss. But time is asymmetric, the future is not going to be like the past. Through our refusals, our insubordination, all the plans come to nothing, all the machines wear out, break down. CAPITAL’S CONTRADICTION IS THAT THE VERY AGENTS THAT CREATE THE ‘FUCK UP’ POSSESS THE ENERGIES IT NEEDS. Only *we* are in perpetual motion: eternally energetic, crafty, obedient, cowardly, insolent, revolting, but always in a motion that is the only source of work, development, surplus.”

— 

 George Caffentzis, 

"The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse" (1980)