sustain-the-riot.pdf
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Suton

From "Qepund Ure Police”
lo Reroluliona’y. Golitiontsm
apler the George Floyd Uprisingé

by
Justin A. Lang
NIGHT OWL DISTRO

CHICAGO, IL

Originally published by the Institute for Anarchist Studies

December 20, 2022

Republished, anti-copyright

Winter 2023
“Fascism has temporarily succeeded under the guise of reform. The only way
we can destroy it is to refuse to compromise with the enemy state and its
ruling class.”

— George Jackson, Blood in My Eye


Sustain the Riot

The murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police
Department on May 25, 2020 sparked a summer of rebellions and
mass mobilizations at a scale unprecedented in the US, with
reverberations across the globe.[1] The image of the burning
Minneapolis third police precinct set the tone of the ensuing
rebellions—a display of confrontation with the police state with few
comparisons in the contemporary era of urban revolt. The riotous
character of the George Floyd Uprisings was the result of the rage
sparked by the visible brutality of the murder of Floyd and
accumulated frustrations after years of failed police reform
following the first wave of the Movement for Black Lives. This
combination of factors brought the question of prison industrial
complex (PIC) abolition to the table of public discourse in ways
never seen before. The spread of abolition revealed that it is nota
coherent concept with a singular interpretation; multiple
“abolitionisms” circulated during the uprisings, often in

contradiction with each other.

In her introduction to the 2005 anthology The New
Abolitionists, Joy James reveals that the existence of multiple
competing abolitionisms has been a longstanding contention within
the project. She argues that abolitionist discourse is deployed by the

state, the “non-incarcerated academic/advocate,” and the “prisoner-
slave”/“captive insurgent” to achieve conflicting goals.!#! Her
analysis focuses on the difference between the abolitionisms of the
captive insurgent and the non-incarcerated advocate in how they
relate to the state. James argues that the abolitionism of the advocate
(informed by academic and non-profit directives) distances itself
from revolutionary struggle and presents abolition as achievable
through incremental “non-reformist reforms.” This approach
presents the state as willing and able to grant abolition, obscuring
the ways in which “anti-Black, racial-colonial logics of
militarization, criminalization, and patrolling are central to the
construction, reproduction, and institutional coherence of modern
social formations.” The captive insurgent’s abolitionism centers
the conditions of state violence in a refusal of pragmatic
compromise with the state, seeking the abolition of the state itself
through revolutionary struggle. In her 2019 lecture “The Architects
of Abolitionism,” James furthers this analysis, arguing that the 1972

ion from the



acquittal of Angela Davis marked the tran
“revolutionary era” to the “reactionary era.” Through this
transition, advocacy/academic abolitionism became the dominant
trajectory of abolitionist discourse, displacing the revolutionary

abolitionism of the captive.

James provides a historical context to examine how abolition
took on different forms as the framework became popularized

during the George Floyd uprisings. Three modalities of abolition
emerged during and after the uprisings. “Two of the modalities
have the potential to be directed toward a revolutionary
abolitionism: autonomous abolition, which is aimed at building
hyperlocal infrastructures as alternatives to the carceral state to
sustain communities and resistance (mutual aid formations, survival
programs, people’s assemblies, anti-repression formations);

and insurrectionary abolition, which refers to direct action and
confrontation with the state (rioting, looting, attacking state
structures, taking territory, eviction defense). However procedural
abolition, which relies on advocacy/academic logics of achieving
abolition through non-reformist reforms to reshape state
infrastructure, became the dominant modality represented in
abolitionist discourse during and after the uprisings. Revisiting the
process by which this occurred reveals the ongoing struggle to define

abolitionism and clarifies the role of the state in the process.

The movement of abolition into popular discourse was opened
up by the intensity of the insurrectionary elements of the initial days
of the rebellions. Two processes led to the ascendance of procedural
abolitionism as the most popularly engaged mode of articulating
abolition: state counterinsurgency attempts aimed at quelling
insurrection and directing its capacious critique into legible
demands, and the emergence of “defund the police” which became a
legible demand to direct at the state. The defund demand is

animated by the gradualist advocacy approach of reforming the state
“toward” abolition. While it has been a galvanizing demand, it
presents a series of pitfalls for developing a revolutionary
abolitionism and conceals other methods for dealing with state
violence. Focusing on furthering the insurrectionary and
autonomist elements which emerged presents arenas of struggle to
develop a more uncompromisingly anti-state pathway toward a

revolutionary abolitionist project.

Insurrectionary Openings

The initial expressions of abolitionism appeared in their most
riotous, demandless form through the burning of the third precinct
and other elements of abolition-in-practice taken up in Minneapolis
and solidarity actions which spread across the country. Insurgents
directly attacked the state’s carceral infrastructure through smashing
and burning police cars. They articulated the inability of the law to
provide redress for state violence through setting fire to legislative
buildings.[7] Insurgents engaged in direct confrontation with
police, often overwhelming them and forcing them to retreat from
zones in various cities. They engaged in fluid looting tactics,
expropriating resources from corporations and redistributing them

in the community.

These tactics represent a form of insurrectionary abolitionism

taken up by largely unidentifiable, self-organized, primarily Black
masses.! This form of abolitionism was beyond what visible (Black)
radical formations had the capacity to facilitate or organize; the most
these organizations could do was publish letters arguing the validity
of looting and rioting as tactics. This abolitionism was also
unassimilable into state attempts at determining the terms of
emerging abolitionist discourse, which is why it garnered intense

repression from the state.

This insurrectionary energy persisted throughout the summer
although with less concentrated frequency over time. Sparks of
looting and rioting would re-emerge in response to new police
killings throughout the summer in Atlanta, Kenosha, Rochester,
Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. The process was well-

described in an essay on the Philadelphia rebellion:

Nearly every week since the beginning of thts long, hot
summer, a different city has occupied the center stage of
this particularly American drama. Through this passing
of the torch, the sequence of riots has dragged on for far
longer than anyone could have expected. Every time it
seemed as if the wave had finally crashed, another city

went up in flames.?!
As the summer progressed, insurgents developed heightened self-
organization and learned from and developed each other’s tactics

across locales.

While this mode of activity continued throughout the
summer, state and radical sources alike identified the first week
following Floyd’s murder as having the greatest insurrectionary
intensity.4“ Two days after the burning of the precinct, the
Minneapolis Department of Public Safety tweeted that “law
enforcement presence will triple in size to address a sophisticated
network of urban warfare.”!"4! Cities across the nation established
curfews and responded to the rebellions with highly militarized
repression. Repressive tactics continued and escalated in different
ways as the summer progressed, however the numbers of arrests and
federal charges were concentrated in that first week! On-the-
ground reports from cities across the U.S. argue that the heightened
repression of the first week of insurgency shifted the forms of
actions people took in following weeks.!! This repression sought to
capture the emerging forms of insurrectionary abolitionism and
bring them back into “the realm of accepted
discourse.” [14] Insurrectionary abolitionism represented a complete
refusal of the legitimacy of the state and its accepted modes of
political action. The state needed to contain this form of abolition

and redirect it into proper procedure.
Counterinsurgency

The state’s chosen discursive counterinsurgency tactics were to
delegitimize insurgent forms of protest through creating distinctions
between good/peaceful and bad/non-peaceful protestors. The state
also aimed to delegitimize “who” was taking up insurgent actions by
calling riotous protesters “outside agitators” that did not represent
the actual community where the action took place. The “actual
community” were the protestors who followed proper, peaceful
forms of action. These discursive moves, as well as the deployment
of curfews which created a peaceful/non-peaceful distinction by
time of day, fractured what was reported as a synergy between
“riotous” and “peaceful” elements for the first few days of rebellion.
Staying outside past curfew signaled a type of non-peaceful
confrontation that many were not prepared to support or engage in.
The internalization of the state’s narratives on peaceful protest also
led to protestors policing each others’ actions to ensure they did not
appear too riotous (a process referred to as peace policing). Each of
these factors led to the quelling of the riots and the dominance of
peaceful forms of protest. The “bad protestors” who initiated the
early confrontational actions phased out of participation in this

stage U5!

The riot and evasive looting diminished in favor of the mass
march and frontal confrontation. Facing a state prepared for “urban

warfare” with a “peaceful” demonstration meant folks made
themselves available for intense militarized police violence.
Unnecessary arrests, kettling, and injuries occurred because folks
thought that by being peaceful they would no longer be engaged as
enemy combatants. Instead of confronting the state like the

“rioters,” “peaceful protestors” sought to be legible as subjects with
rights who, in simply “making their voice be heard,” were not
deserving of violence. Acquiescing to the state’s established terms of
proper engagement, and disavowing or policing those who stepped
out of line, changed the trajectory of the rebellions. This shift in the
terms of state legibility would have significance in the realm of

mands.

Barack Obama’s June 1, 2020 essay was a critical moment in

e shaping of abolitionism as it was emerging as a popular language
within the first week of revolt.[16] The essay worked in tandem
with the previously mentioned counterinsurgency efforts to quell
the insurrectionary abolitionism of rioting and looting. The state
undoubtedly recognized the demandless praxis of abolition in the
revolt and its total rejection of the state, and sought to reign this
energy back within acceptable terms of political action. Obama, as
the designated Black rebellion-queller due to his position in the

Black political imaginary, was deployed by the state to present “real



change” as achievable only through petitioning the state for policy

reform. Obama framed “protest” as outside of politics and only a
means for raising awareness for “proper” political activities of policy

change and voting.

Obama aimed to write out the political interventions of the
revolts and argue that “real” political action only occurs in policy
advocacy after the revolt. While forms of insurrectionary
abolitionism continued, they became overshadowed by peaceful
protest-as-petition. In fact, liberal media and research groups
attempted to write out the early stages of revolt and present the full
summer of protests as “mostly peaceful.”47! I argue that the
popularization of abolitionism within this context, particularly
through the demand to defund the police, conceptually traps it
within the frame of state legibility and appeal. This process
represents a longer trend in the trajectory of abolitionist thought
wherein a procedural framework which aims at gradually reforming
the state toward abolition has become dominant. It is important to
analyze the logics of this procedural form of abolition in order to
determine ways to press against it and work toward placing greater
emphasis on the insurrectionary and autonomous forms that were

also present during and after the uprisings.

Defund the Police

The concept of defunding the police as it has been articulated since

the summer of 2020 has existed in the Movement for Black Lives-era
police reform/abolition discourse since at least the 2016 Vision for
Black Lives policy platform. This platform uses the language and
framework of “invest-divest”: divest from the prison industrial
complex and invest in community, social, and health
infrastructures. The invest-divest framework re-emerged in the
language of defunding first through a May 25, 2020 petition created
by Reclaim the Block and the Black Visions Collective, two key
formations organizing out of Minneapolis.4! On May 30, 2020, the
Black Lives Matter Global Network site published a petition for a
national defunding of police.!*" By June 5" a website called
“Defund12” contained email templates for people in cities across
the U.S. to petition elected officials to “reallocate egregious police
budgets towards education, social services, and dismantling racial

injustice.”

While there have been various interpretations of the meaning
of defunding the police, what is most pertinent to this essay is the
ways in which the demand was developed and pushed by self-
identified prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionists.
Abolitionists who pushed the defunding demand argued against
both anti-abolitionist dismissals of the demand and other
abolitionists’ claims that it is purely reformist. They argued against
the reformist critique and attempted to retain the demand as
conceptually within the trajectory of working towards abolition.

The logics supporting the framework of “defunding as a means
toward abolition” are informed by arguments around the nature of
reformist reforms versus abolitionist reforms. Abolitionist reforms
are presented as those which aim to decrease the size, scope, and
power of the prison industrial complex, while reformist reforms
assume the inevitability of the PIC and seek to reform its

management, accountability systems, and behavioral protocols.

The discourse between these two frameworks of reform played
out in real time through the contention between the 8 Cant
Wait and 8 to Abolition campaigns. 8 Can't Wait was a set of
reformist reforms aimed at changing police departments’ use of
force protocols. The set of proposals was released by Campaign

s who reached an elevated status



Zero (a group of celebrity activis
following the 2014 Ferguson uprisings) on June 3, 2020 when
demands for defunding and abolition were becoming more
prominent. The project proposed the following reforms: ban
chokeholds and strangleholds; require de-escalation; require
warning before shooting; exhaust all other means before shooting;
duty to intervene and stop excessive force by other officers; ban
shooting at moving vehicles; require use-of-force continuum; and

require comprehensive reporting each time an officer uses forces or



threatens to do so.

The reforms were touted to reduce police violence by seventy-
two percent if all eight were adopted by police departments. After

the release of the platform, police departments immediately began
sharing the list of reforms on social media pages, identifying the ones
they already had implemented as ways of presenting themselves as
leading the charge for police reform. However, the fact that many of
the proposed reforms were already implemented across the country,
especially in large cities that are notable for police violence (e.g. New
York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, each had seven of
the eight policies implemented) diminishes the argument that these
reforms actually reduce violence.*! Abolitionists argued that the
emergence of the platform during a moment of upheaval and the
proliferation of abolitionist ideas was an attempt at redirecting the
new terrain of demands to the same reformism of the previous

iteration of Black Lives Matter protests.

A group of abolitionists released a response campaign called 8
to Abolition on June 7, 2020 as a direct critique of 8 Can’t Wait, re-
centering the argument for abolition within the growing discourse
on policing. This alternative platform presented its own set of eight
demands, each encompassing a range of policy changes “targeted
toward city and municipal powers.” [24] Its demands included:
defund police; demilitarize communities; remove police from
schools; free people from jails and prisons; repeal laws that
criminalize survival; invest in community self-governance; provide
safe housing for everyone; and invest in care, not cops. 8 to
Abolition can be read alongside the #DefundPolice toolkit created

by Interrupting Criminalization as a key document articulating the
logics of defunding and its associated demands due to the extent of
its popular circulation and dissemination by visible Movement for
Black Lives organizations. The range of demands presented by the

campaign also reflect those presented to city councils across the

country during and in the aftermath of the uprisings.

The targets of 8 to Abolition are different from those of
reformist reforms. It is interested in the reach, legitimacy, and power
of police rather than the police’s behavioral protocols. It targets
collective psychic and material investments in policing, seeking to
redirect them towards infrastructural solutions for the social causes
of harm, crime, and need. However, this framework does not fully
depart from 8 Cant Waitin its proposal for a state-mediated
project of abolition. It responds to a set of reforms with another set
of reforms, and the assumed trajectory of abolition is through policy
reform and state(-funded) institutions rather than autonomous

forms of building power.

Procedural Abolition

The procedural approach delays revolutionary preparation—as
George Jackson argues, “with each reform, revolution [becomes]
more remote.” [25] It acquiesces to the state’s post-civil rights
movement attempts to redirect Black insurgency into formal

political channels rather than autonomous or riotous formations
and tactics—“reformism [is] allowed.” [26][27] The presentation of
abolition as being something the state can grant relegitimizes the
state as it attempts to delegitimize the carceral state. The approach
relies on an assumption that the carceral state will “wither away,”
obscuring the ways in which the state will hold onto its
foundational relations of carceral violence. The state and the

carceral state are inseparable.

Procedural abolition also does not account for the ways in
which defunding or altering the institution of police could lead to
the transferring of policézg into new forms and even the “social
services” that are the desired targets for shifted funding. For
example, in the aftermath of the summer of 2020, cities that
“defunded” their police departments quickly moved to replacing
them with private security.[28] As Dylan Rodriguez argues with his
concept of “white reconstruction,” reform does not weaken the
state; it sustains and strengthens it with new forms that are made to
appear less violent.[29] The state will use any reform to maintain its
foundational commitments to white supremacy and anti-Black

domestic war.

The popularization of procedural logics led to the use of
petitions to try to address even these foundational dynamics of anti-
Black violence. An example is the Movement for Black Lives adding
a demand to their policy platform for the state to “respect the rights

of protestors” in the aftermath of police violence against protestors
during the 2020 summer. They also released a graphic which called
on readers to call their representatives to demand that they “end the
war on Black people.” There is no petition that will get the state to
respect Black protest when anti-Black violence—specifically
anticipatory violence to prevent the fantasized Black uprising—is
the foundation of the state itself. [30] Redress for anti-Black violence
exceeds what can be petitioned for from a representative, however
the overrepresentation of procedural logics constrains us to the
methods sanctioned by formal politics. The procedural approach
obscures what our real relationship to the state is, and frames state
violence as an aberration that can be fixed rather than the expected
response to Black movement. As George Jackson stated, “we will
not succeed until we fully accept the fact that the enemy is aware,
determined, disguised, totalitarian, and mercilessly

counterrevolutionary.”[31

The procedural approach engages the state as if Black people
are in a “clientelist relationship” with the state rather than an
adversarial one. It does not prepare us for the actual conflict that
will be required to abolish the prison industrial complex or build
infrastructure to deal with the state’s merciless forces that will
respond to Black insurgency. Attempts to point out contradictions
in police behavior toward their “citizens” —“they are supposed to
protect and serve us, yet they do not respect our first amendment

rights!”—fall short because they obscure the fact that “rights” do
not offer us actual defense and that the only recognition the state
grants us when we “contest or exceed its order” is recognition as a
threat.[32] Black folks must recognize that we already have a
tenuous relationship to “citizenship”—we are a threat to order prior
to any action we take. And if others want to join the party they have
to be prepared to have their defenses removed and see the state as the
enemy that it is. The logics of petition weaken an abolitionist
analysis of our relationship to the state and leave us in a state of
surprise whenever violence occurs. Assessing our compromised
capacity to rely on the terms of policy and protocol calls for a

different framework of abolition beyond procedure.

Abolition as Objective

The emergence and coherence of “abolition through policy
demand” presented a tension with the insurgent/insurrectionary
activity that was taking place on the ground during the first week of
the 2020 rebellion. While the initial actions rejected a type of
coherence, representing an unassimilable refusal of the state, a
critique and desire much more expansive than that which can be
translated into “specific laws and institutional practices,” the defund
the police demand represented a type of legibility to the state." As

Obama was critiquing the lack of demands of the riot, it was as if the
call to defund the police emerged to say “we actually do have a
demand.” Whereas the riots presented the impossibility of the state
and its sanctioned modes of policy petition to grant freedom from
police-state violence, the act of forming a legible demand to the
state—a demand not even for total defunding but for specific
reductions in budgets—shifted the terrain from expansive critique
and impossibility to presenting a pragmatic policy demand that the
state is argued to be able to easily achieve.54[35]

The expansive critique and demandlessness of the riots present
a way to more clearly define our relation to the carceral state and
think through other “pathways toward abolition” that are available
beyond those bound by state timelines. The “steps” toward
abolition as presented by M4BL, Critical Resistance, and
Interrupting Criminalization revolve around non-reformist reforms.
The demandless insurrectionary and autonomous abolitionisms
present a pathway to abolition now through creating new social
relations. The articulated demand narrows the scope of what folks
are fighting for to terms recognizable to the state and presents the

state as being possible of granting what the people want.

The demand also disciplines the forms of movement folks can
take up, redirecting self-activity into budget campaigns. Reports
from several cities indicate that this shift in focus toward
organizational bureaucracy led to the fading out of participation of

the most rebellious elements from the initial days of the
uprisings.[36] Folks who have already engaged in a total rejection of
the state will not be activated by the “long game” of petition-based
campaigns. George Jackson argues that “anything less than an
effective defense/attack weapon and a charger for the people to
mount vow...is meaningless to the great majority of the slaves...‘long
range-politics’...cannot be made relevant to the person who expects
to die tomorrow.” [37] People need to see abolition as immediate
material interventions into everyday social life, not a process

contingent on state budgetary cycles.

When responding to state officials’ critiques and refusals of
defunding the police, abolitionists argued that “defund was already
the compromise.” Why lead with compromise in a moment of
unprecedented insurgency? Why not present the people with the
objective of total abolition and potentially force the state into
concessions later rather than confining abolition “within the

strictures of ‘pragmatics’””—“the domain of the possible...
determinable horizons and measures of certitude”?[38] The
pragmatic steps of non-reformist reforms are used to provide folks
with concrete steps to see the possibility of achieving what is often
dismissed as an impossible framework. Pragmatic demands are used
to show that abolition can be worked toward now. But what other
pathways to abolition can be presented to show folks that it is
possible? What pathways immediately begin shifting our relations to

each other and move us toward self-determination? The pathway to
abolition should not be confined to a timeline that is contingent on

the state’s response to our demands.

George Jackson argues that “the new revolutionary
consciousness will develop in the struggles of withdrawal” from the
enemy state and its institutions.[39] The lingering of state
legitimacy even after moments of upheaval against the state will be a
key target in trying to develop a revolutionary abolitionism. If
revolutionaries were to move away from demands at this point,
defunding is already in circulation by the people and state actors.
The state’s cooptation of defunding and/or unwillingness to go
through with it can be a point of politicization to redirect people to
autonomous and insurrectionary projects. As stated in a ‘zine on
insurrectional abolitionism, “If unmet political demands are indeed
the entry point into learning the imperatives of holistic

revolutionary transformation for millions during this conjecture so
be it.” [40

Organizers are already taking up this tactic. In Minneapolis,
after a City Charter Commission voted to prevent the city from

defunding and disbanding its police department, a local organizer,



Kieran Frazier Knutson, responded by arguing that “our best hope
for radical change does not flow through the city council or
legislative process, but through building our own autonomous
capability of resisting the police and building representative and

accountable working class defense organizations to keep the
community safe.”[41] Abolition as objective, rather than demand,
removes state mediation and orients us toward creating abolition
now. Abolitionism’s attention to creating alternative forms of
organization and relation that counter the carceral impulses of the
state make abolition a framework that is useful as a prefigurative
politics for a revolutionary project. Abolition as objective attunes us
to the ways in which people are already enacting abolition in both
spectacular and mundane moments in order to further them toward
confronting and smashing the state. The 2020 summer showed us
that people are already ready for militant actions. Postponement

only allows the state to recover and re-legitimize itself.

Sustaining the Riot

Following the first few weeks of the uprisings, I was having a
conversation with some friends when one shared that their neighbor
had asked them “what’s next?” after the riots. My response then,
and continues to be, is that the rush to move beyond the riot
(referring to the broad range of insurgent activity) often lends to the
procedural approach I have outlined—redirecting the energy of the
riot toward making sensible demands to the state. Folks are tired of
perpetual demonstration for the sake of demonstration. However,
moving from demonstration to attack requires switching the aim

and targets of mobilization. Rather than making an appeal, the aim
of the attack is “the paralysis of the economy, of

normality.”[42] The efforts to quell the summer’s rebellions show
that “what the system is afraid of is not just these acts of sabotage
themselves, but also them spreading socially. Uncontrollability itself

is the strength of the insurrection.” [43.

The 2020 summer’s revolts truly spread socially across the
country, sharing and developing tactics over time. A node in this
constellation of revolts was an “unprecedented” number of prison
uprisings which began in March 2020 in response to COVID-19
conditions.[44] On December 27, 2020 five prisoners at
McCormick Correctional Institution in South Carolina attempted
to escape and a guard was locked in a cell.[45] This abolitionism of
the captive insurgent was largely disconnected from the narratives of
the George Floyd uprisings. Supporting these kinds of actions will
be necessary in furthering abolitionist praxis and better connecting
anti-police energies to efforts to abolish prisons. The prison breaks
in Nigeria during the #EndSARS protests present a template for
thinking through the linkages between inside-outside revolt.[46]

As Sylvia Wynter notes, the riot “creates a real contradiction
between structure and anti-structure, social order and man-made
anarchy.” [47] The riot is not only a form of attack; it is a
manifestation of the commons, a “rehearsal” of the communization
of social relations.[48] Sustaining the riot requires extending

momentary upheaval into everyday life. It requires infrastructure
and mass participation which can proliferate—not bureaucratically
order or control—resistance to the state. Sustaining the riot also
involves constant revolt not merely in reaction to instances of
spectacular violence. Mutual aid is a site where we can see the
connections between the spectacular moment of the riot and the

building up of revolutionary infrastructure in the everyday.

In reflecting on the initial riots in Minneapolis, Charmaine
Chua argues that “they attest to a mass re-imagination of systems of

collective care.” She continues,

as stores and banks burned, many looters chose not to hoard
but to give away: teenagers walked out of the looted Target
with armfuls of diapers and food that they gave to families
affected by store closures. Others stacked cases of alcohol and
beer outside of looted liquor stores for the community to
share, imagining (if only momentarily) through these actions
what a world of plenitude for the many might look like.[49]

Chua connects the relations of the riot to the practice of mutual aid,

arguing that it “provides a transformative alternative that seeks



radical change through new ways to redistribute material resources,
practice democracy, and mobilize people for ongoing

struggle.” [50] The proliferation of mutual aid projects in response
to the pandemic and uprising were met with police repression.
Police attempted to destroy and clear out community mutual aid

spaces such as the Rayshard Brooks Peace Center in Atlanta and
houseless encampments in Seattle. Stealing mutual aid resources
such as water and food and targeting medics were tactics used to
quell protests and occupations. Dean Spade argues that “We might
understand mutual aid projects as frontline work in a war over who
will control social relations and how survival will be reproduced,
especially in the face of worsening crises.”[51] Defending mutual aid
formations will be a critical site of politicization and militant

resistance to state repression.

Revolutionary Abolition

Abolition presents a range of means to attend to the space of
the “not-yet” pending revolution. It enables questions such as: What
does the world we want look like and how do we get there? What
means of “getting there” are prioritized while others fall off the
table? Which means captivate which audiences? Which ones
facilitate us building alternative relations and forms of power now,
not after the state gives us funding or a budget hearing? Which ones
give the state more capacity to determine our lives and the scope of

what is possible?

The analyses of captive insurgents such as George Jackson
provoke us to move through an abolitionism that refuses
compromises with the state and exceeds what can be achieved

through reform . Adjusting abolition so that its desires can be
articulated within “legitimate” politics limits the framework and
constrains our capacity to be clear about what needs to be done.
Abolition at its logical end is not just the abolition of police and
prisons, or even the state, but the terms of order as we know it.
Revolutionary abolition calls for “a sociopolitical infrastructure to
intervene in every area of Black life” and prepare the people for the
necessary confrontation to carry this destructive potential to its
conclusion. [52]

As I was finishing the conclusion of this essay on December
30, 2020, I saw the news that another Black person had been killed
by police in Minneapolis, after all that had occurred there since
May. Police murders have not stopped even as protests aimed at
bringing attention to them have decreased in frequency. This
constant state of urgency presents the need for formations and
infrastructures to sustain attacks against the state, and to defend
Black communities from further violence. As abolitionists aim to
continue inviting people into engaging with the framework, it must
meet the immediate needs of folks faced with death now. It must
present methods of defense and attack that do not rely on a gradual
withering away of the carceral state. A defunded police department
can still kill. And for the police to actually disappear it will require

much more than policy change; abolitionists have to make this clear.
End Notes

[1] Analysts termed the George Floyd protests the “largest movement in US
history” in terms of participation. (See: “Black Lives Matter May be the Largest
Movement in US History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020,
hetps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-
crowd-size.html.) The number of protests which occurred and their range was
also considered unprecedented. (See this collection of data points from Cresote

Mapts: https://www.creosotemaps.com/blm2020/index.html).

2] Joy James, The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and Contemporary
Prison Writings (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005).

3] Joy James, “Airbrushing Revolution for the Sake of Abolition,” Black
Perspectives (AATHS, August 12, 2020), https://www.aaihs.org/airbrushing-

revolution-for-the-sake-of-abolition/.

4] Dylan Rodriguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of
Genocide (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2020) 44.

5] Joy James, “The Architects of Abolitionism,” YouTube (Brown University,
May 6, 2019), hteps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9rvRsWKDx0.

6] Rustbelt Abolition Radio, “Tasting Abolition,” Rustbelt Abolition Radio,
August 13, 2020, hetps://rustbeltradio.org/2020/08/12/tasting-abolition/.

7] “Nashville protestors set fires, topple controversial statue,” Associated Press,
May 30, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/nashville-tennessee-tn-state-wire-
2e7f5b2a93025df5b4343fc14184842c.





8] Anonymous Contributor, “Welcome to the Party: The George Floyd
Uprising in NYC,” It’s Going Down, June 24, 2020,
https://itsgoingdown.org/welcome-to-the-party-the-george-floyd-uprising-in-

nye/.
‘9] Anonymous Contributor, “Cars, Riots, and Black Liberation: Lessons from
Philadelphia’s Walter Wallace Rebellion,” It’s Going Down, November 26, 2020,
hetps://itsgoingdown.org/cars-riots-and-black-liberation-lessons-from-
philadelphias-walter-wallace-rebellion/.

10] Anonymous Contributor, “Notes from the Rockford Rebellion: Black
Revolt in the Rustbelt from a New Afrikan Anarchist Perspective,” It’s Going
Down, August 21, 2020, https://itsgoingdown.org/notes-from-the-rockford/.

11] hetps://twitter.com/MnDPS_DPS/status/1266865889552588801.

12] Michael Loadenthal, “Tracking Federal Cases Related to Summer Protests,
Riots, & Uprisings,” The Prosecution Project, December 22, 2020,
heeps://theprosecutionproject.org/2020/10/29/tracking-federal-cases-related-to-
summer-protests-riots-uprisings/.

13] Anonymous, “Welcome to the Party.”

14] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of
History, (New York: Beacon Press, 1995), 72.

15] Anonymous, “Welcome to the Party.”

16] Barack Obama, “How to Make This Moment the Turning Point for Real
Change,” Medium (Medium, June 1, 2020),
https://barackobama.medium.com/how-to-make-this-moment-the-turning-
point-for-real-change-9fa209806067.

7] Roudabeh Kishi and Sam Jones, “Demonstrations & Political Violence in
America: New Data for Summer 2020,” ACLED, December 11, 2020,
hetps://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-violence-in-
america-new-data-for-summer-2020/.





18] https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/
23)

24)

25
118.

26)

27]

28)

29)

30)

31





32!

19] hteps://secure.everyaction.com/eR7GA70z70GL8doBq19LtA2

20] hetps://blacklivesmatter.com/defundthepolice/

heeps://defund12.0rg/
hetps://8cantwait.org/

Olivia Murray, “Why 8 Won’t Work: The Failings of the 8 Can’t Wait

Campaign and the Obstacle Police Reform Efforts Pose to Police Abolition,”
Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, June 17, 2020,
hteps://harvardercl.org/why-8-wont-work/.

hteps://www.8toabolition.com/.

George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1990)

Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 120.

Minkah Makalani, “Black Lives Matter and the limits of formal Black

politics.” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 3 (2017): 534.

Candice Bernd, “‘Defund Police’ Doesn’t Mean Hire Private Guns - But

Cities Are Doing Just That,” Truthout(September 1, 2020),
hteps://truthout.org/articles/defund-police-doesnt-mean-hire-private-guns-but-

cities-are-doing-just-that/.

Rodriguez, White Reconstruction.

Nick Brady. “Black Ether: Rioting, Negativity, and the Political, (Virtual

Colloquium hosted by Bucknell University on April 12, 2022.)

Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 135.

Stephen Dillon. Fugitive life: The queer politics of the prison state. (Duke

University Press, 2018), 31.
[33] Obama, “How to Make This Moment the Turning Point.”

[34] CrimethInc., “Why We Don’t Make Demands,” May 15, 2015,
hetps://crimethine.com/2015/05/05/feature-why-we-dont-make-demands.

[35] The framework of Defund the Police aspires toward an “end goal” of the
total defunding of police departments. However in practice, the demands
proposed during the moment of the framework’s popularization (and after)
mainly argued for reductions “by a specific dollar amount or percentage.” This
strategy is suggested by Interrupting Criminalization in their #DefundPolice
Toolkit (see pages 10 and 11). Pages 21-23 of the Toolkit compile Defund
demands from across the country which primarily follow this formula

(heeps://www.interruptingcriminalization.com/defundpolice-toolkit).

[36] See: “Welcome to the Party” and “Notes from the Rockford Rebellion.”
[37] Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 10.

[39] Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 122.

[40] True Leap Press, “Insurrectional Abolitionism (Part 2),” True Leap Press:
Printing & Distribution, December 18, 2020,
hetps://trueleappress.com/2020/12/17/insurrectional-abolitionism-part-2/.

[41] Charmaine Chua, “Abolition Is a Constant Struggle: Five Lessons from
Minneapolis.” Theory & Event 23, no. 5 (2020), 131.

[42] Do or Die, “Insurrectionary Anarchy: Organising for Attack!,” The
Anarchist Library, accessed December 31, 2020,
dic



insurrectionary-anarchy.



hetps://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/do-or-
[43] Do or Die, “Insurrectionary Anarchy.”

[44] hteps://perilouschronicle.com/covid-19-list-of-prisoner-actions/
45] hetps://itsgoingdown.org/guard-locked-in-a-cell-during-disturbance-at-

mecormick-correctional/

46] “Nigeria Sars protest: Prison break and gunshots heard as unrest continues,”
BBC News, October 22, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-
54642947,

47] Sylvia Wynter. “No humans involved: An open letter to my colleagues.” In
Forum NHI: Knowledge for the 21st century, vol. 1, no. 1 (Stanford: Institute
NHI, 1994), 14.

48] Saidiya Hartman. “The anarchy of colored girls assembled in a riotous
manner.” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (2018): 465-490; Robyn Maynard

and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Rehearsals for Living. Haymarket Books,
2022.

49] Chua, “Abolition Is a Constant Struggle,” 128.
50] Chua, “Abolition Is a Constant Struggle,” 136.

51] Dean Spade, “Solidarity not charity: Mutual aid for mobilization and
survival.” Social Text 38, no. 1 (2020): 147.





52] Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin. Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The
Definitive Edition (Pluto Press, 2021), 131.
NOT ONLY DO WE
DESIRE TO CHANGE OUR
LIVES IMMEDIATELY,

WHICH WE ARE SEEKING
OUR ACCOMPLICES.