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Abolition Everything

We are forced to reckon with the madness of the world. My friends and I, all just verging on twenty, are standing in the eye of what feels like a political-emotional storm, grasping for some historical precedent that might assure us that what we are living through is not as brutal as it feels.

In a year of isolation and upheaval, 2020 has brought both a political and personal clarity I have never felt before. Young people, including myself, are seeing the world in a new light.

It was just weeks after my sixteenth birthday, the morning marine layer veiling my windows in a gauzy haze, the semi-deflated “Happy Sweet 16!” balloons hanging ominously above my bed, the cold air mingled with the warm light. My mother floated softly in to tell me who had won the 2016 presidential election. All I really remember from that day was a voice in the back of my mind saying: If he can be President of the United States, so can I. I thought that would be the way to change the world.

Ignited by the election, my entire high school life revolved around electoral politics. I was fueled by what felt like equal parts anguish and optimism. I consistently dreamed of making change “from the inside,” setting up voting registration drives all over my county. I worked for the California state assembly, going to the Capitol every six months or so to work on legislation and coordinate with other young people. I spoke before committees, cabinets, boards, local news, and just about any audience who would hear me, advocating for legislation that would lower the voting age to 17.

My public schooling had cleansed history, just enough, so I was convinced that those abstractions of freedom, equality, liberty and justice were just dreams unattained, but still achievable through electoralism. I thought if we could have a president who was humane, we could have a country that didn’t hurt people for money so often. I didn’t see the government as something that could be inherently malicious — I just thought our representatives were.

Despite my involvement, I never felt like I truly belonged in political spaces. I always felt like I had to show up as half of myself, leaving anything that could be considered as too “extreme” at the door. But — I would tell myself — politics was about compromise. I felt that inauthenticity was a small price to pay for the opportunity to make change.

I hate to admit it, but neutrality was something I longed for. I was heartbroken by the division I saw in my country.

So: I entered my freshman year of college with the intent of making my own way to Washington.

The political science department at my university prides itself on its objectivity. They also wouldn’t stop lying to me.

My notes read:

The more I read, the more it didn’t hold up with what I saw in the world.

I came to each lecture more curious — not because of the material — but because of the spectacle of it all. A room of mostly white, mostly male, mostly middle-class, privileged students, sitting in a class taught at a public university, scribbling furiously in their seats. Awkward, stressed, sleep-deprived bodies, preparing for a future full of nice paychecks.

I began to raise my hand: both an experiment, and — though I did not know it then — protest.

Why were we talking about laws, and the homogenous group of wealthy white men who wrote them, but not the people whom these laws actually affected, or killed? Why were we talking about civil liberties, but barely glossing over the human beings to whom they were being denied?

Why is it that to study this nation is to realize its consistent failure to provide the very virtues it claims to represent?

When I asked these questions, I was met with incredible force. It was all “devil’s advocates” and those who said my interest in “identity politics” was just a symptom of my soft, artistic femininity, making my concerns uncredible. As if my professors and peers were somehow unbiased by virtue of seeing history like a flat line of events and numbers — rather than a constant, impassioned struggle between human beings. They lied about the present just as much as they did the past. I felt crushed.

It was not just that I disagreed with what was being taught. It was the realization that I had been lied to, that the fight was unfair. Here I was, my whole life, believing that “politics was about compromise” when it very clearly, historically, was not. Maybe somewhere, that is true — but not in the United States. Politics in the United States is, and always has been, about domination. It is for this reason that anyone who cares about equality never actually feels like they belong once they cross over to the “inside.” We do not belong.

Expanding freedom, equality, liberty, and justice to the marginalized has never been the will of the American government. It has never endowed rights without bloodshed. If anything, progress manifests in spite of our system.

I am no longer enchanted by the fairy tale that is the American state.

Under our system, the human body is not valuable unless commodified. That is why the American government may, in the same swing: kill civilians, deny them healthcare, and still function as it is intended to. The state is not built to protect human life.

With the present circumstances of the coronavirus, human bodies are even more alienated from political spaces. We may not enter our city halls or catch our representatives on their way out of the chambers. We organize and educate on screens. We wear masks when we protest so we become anonymous, a sea of unrecognizable bodies. Some say it’s better this way, so that the state surveillance cannot see us either.

I do not think it will be too long until people begin using technology to replace human judgement in court. Artificial intelligence will most likely fully replace human law enforcement officers in the next generation or so. It is already becoming the largest component of warfare. If AI doesn’t literally assume elected office, it will percolate into every aspect of politics in the near future. Perhaps court rooms and assembly chambers, places notorious for the sweating, heaving, and fervor of human bodies — will one day completely be inhabited by computers. Some might say that this is a good thing: that AI will be less prone to human flaws. I think that if you look at the state, and its history, that AI will only make its violent functions more efficient. More lethal.

The same way political scientists claim the objectivity of their history, scientists, mathematicians, and giant tech monopolies fiercely assure the neutrality of their algorithms. They are lying. By virtue of our humanity, we are flawed. Motivations will forever be implemented in everything we create. We cannot use “science” to evade that truth. I fear a world where the human is totally dismembered from the political. I feel we are closer to that reality than we realize.

The American state may have the upper hand when it comes to violently enforcing the racialization, gendering, stratification, and misuse of human bodies. I believe that the people, however, have the exact resources necessary to save ourselves.

Voting alone will not save us.

Voting may be seen as a means of harm reduction, but it also legitimizes an inherently harmful system: the United States government. All I know is that participation in government should be addressed on a case-by-case basis. I want to allow for some grey area here. There must be balance. Perhaps early stages of revolution and reform can happen somewhat simultaneously and parallel to one another. A transitory state can reduce potential harm that may otherwise occur in a quick changeover. By building the revolutionary infrastructure necessary for the future now rather than later, we can mitigate the suffering that would come with an unstable, overnight eradication of the present state.

Voting is extremely personal, a right that generations in this country have died for, and so I will not argue whether to participate in it or not. All I will say is that it cannot be the only thing we do. Our survival depends on that.

So what actions will institute change?

First, we must challenge everything the state offers in order to find truth. The hypocrisies of the state become clearer the longer you look. Take “unity,” a word so often weaponized by neoliberal politicians and activists alike. It does not take much to realize that “unity” simply cannot exist within a hierarchical system. Unity cannot take hold when the state is built to facilitate capitalism (an intrinsically divided class structure). The neoliberal call for “unity” is — and always has been — a manipulation of the very people they divide, exploit, and claim to serve. Unity cannot occur from the state apparatus. The only way we will ever be able to establish unity is through people. Through us.

Further, it requires changing our perception of power. Power is both extremely real, (in that it determines life and death), as well as extremely abstract (in that it is difficult to quantify). I believe that power, in its truest form, is both individual and collective in nature. It is the ability to have agency over one’s own life and freedom, as well as the ability to assure life and freedom within a community. I do not think power necessitates violence, domination, or hierarchy to function. Still — power is not something that needs to be granted. It does not sit stagnant in a seat for an election cycle. Power is something that is often taken, with struggle and intention.

The people are a reservoir of power. The second we realize that human beings — not corporations or elected offices — are the most potent political force on earth, we get closer to our dream.

The sky was orange yesterday. Smoke stinging in my eyes, clawing at my throat, waves of nausea, a light, dizzy spiraling to my head, a heaviness to my blood, so that it was writhing in my temples, sloshing erratically in my veins, pounding in my chest. I tried to look ahead, to see a world where I might have children of my own.

How many orange skies would they see? How long until the whole world was like this, swallowed in its haze?

Our current system provides one inevitable end: an uninhabitable earth. It promises us no future.

Bodies in this country are dropping like flies. As our planet changes, we will continually be met with increasingly unmanageable disasters. In a world that already cares so little for the well-being of humans, one can only imagine the imminent, horrific existence of our descendants.

I have reached a point where I am extremely desperate for a culture that values life. Protects life. Cherishes life, and affirms the connectedness of us all. For a long time, I felt stifled and afraid, unable to express the world I so desperately longed to create. And then I found prison abolition.

Prison abolition is not solely the eradication of prisons and police, but the creation of a world that provides social services and eliminates the root causes of crime. Prison abolition serves as a framework for a culture that is not punitive or inhumane, but believes in the potential of every human being to be redeemable and protected. To abolish prisons would also require us to abolish all those systems that are inherently violent: hierarchy, capitalism, discrimination in all of its forms.

Our future is not without hope. It lies in imagining a future beyond the current state, one where there is an emphasis, not on individualism, but on togetherness. We can take hold of our own sovereignty within our own communities. We can revere and honor each other as we should revere and honor ourselves, so that we may create microcosms of cultures and commons that are as complex and changeable as the individuals living within them.

Every person should have the freedom to create, participate in, and live in a space they feel connected to and loved by. While prison abolition necessitates the abolition of a violent state, it allows us to enact true democracy. Democracy comes naturally and spontaneously within an abolitionist structure, which seeks to implement non-hierarchical power. This allows for the collaboration of fellow citizens to create a space that serves their needs and fulfills their wants, sustainably and effectively.

Individual freedom is tied to collective freedom. You need to make your art, write your stories, love freely and unconditionally, and fight without reservation for what you believe. We need you to. It is the only thing that will light the way for those beside you. For those that come after you.

As Ruth Wilson Gilmore states, “Where life is precious, life is precious.” We all play a part in one another’s freedom. Despite the spatial distance between rural and urban, rich and poor bodies, our individual realities make up one whole under racialized capitalism. To change prisons is to change everything. Abolition calls for everything that will ensure our survival. It is the flame that illuminates the path towards our livelihood.

Abolitionist values are exactly those exalted in our constitution: freedom, equality, liberty and justice. Unlike the constitution, however, abolition does not allow for the exploitation and dehumanization of human bodies. It acknowledges our nation’s violent history, and paves a way forward with wisdom and compassion. It actually effectively establishes the unity that we have so long been denied.

If I were to meet with my sixteen year old self, we would, most likely, reach a consensus on one thing: politics is nothing without people.

Laws are just letters on paper. Money is just fabric. These systems were imagined by us, which means they can be reimagined by us. Everything is everything because we made it so; which means everything can be anything we want it to be.

Human beings breathe life and legitimacy into the society we create. The future is just as malleable and flexible as we are.

It is life and death. Every day, we must scream so as to be seen, fight so as to be felt, love so as to be untameable. If we do not change our current state, we will not outlive it. It will get worse before it gets better. We have to be prepared that it will get much, much worse. But I have faith. I know my generation.

We will not simply watch the world burn.

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