Intervention

In the Time of Trump: Housing, Whiteness, and Abolition

– by Manissa M Maharawal and Erin McElroy (The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project) –

How is Trump the landlord connected to Trump the president? How can we think about the rise of Trump’s reign through a lens critical of the US’s racist and colonial histories of private property? Focused on the geography of the San Francisco Bay Area and the analysis of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, this piece shows the relationships between luxury development, public housing, gentrification, liberalism, and racialized dispossession. For understanding the data and building an intersectional movement, this piece argues that we need an abolitionist approach to private property.

As the US Oligarchy Expands Its War, Middle Class White People Must Take a Side

– by Robert Nichols –
Now that the war and theft is speeding up and spreading outward, it is catching up many more people, including many of the white middle class people who used to think that they were safe from all that kind of thing. The big question will be: what will we middle class white people do? Will we fight only to return to the old system, that is, to return to the ‘slow war’ period, the time when people of color were exploited and dominated, with (some) of the benefits trickling down to us? Or will we stand with those people who have always been fighting this system against the authoritarians and oligarchs in order to produce a new and more universally just system? What side are we on?

The Inauguration of Fascism? Thinking Violence and Resistance in the Age of Trump

– by David Langstaff –
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, fascism has once again returned to center stage in left political discourse. If we aim to overcome the impasse of left praxis, our theories of fascism and resistance must refuse false dichotomies of race and class, as well as the treating of fascist violence as a radical departure from the normal operations of the liberal democratic state. Fascistic ascendance, as an historically specific manifestation of white nationalist revanchism, cannot be meaningfully apprehended apart from the foundations of the U.S. settler colonial state in racial slavery and genocide. Turning towards this “position of the unthought” opens up the possibility, not only of grasping systemic violence at its roots, but of recognizing and imagining, celebrating and embracing, forms of insurgent social life which already move beneath, against, and beyond the socio-ecological catastrophe that is the modern world.

Diluting Radical History: Blood in the Water and the Politics of Erasure

In this incisive critique, Orisanmi Burton argues that Heather Ann Thompson’s acclaimed book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising and Its Legacy actively undermines the significance of the rebellion by erasing racial violence from the normal routines of prison life, ignoring key aspects of the rebels’ critique of prisons, and distorting their radical abolitionist politics.

Stealing from the Ivory Tower: Weaponizing Knowledge and Resistance as Radical Affirmation

– by Kristian Kim –
Nothing is inherently revolutionary. Anything that does not engage people’s material needs in the service of radically transforming the world they inhabit is not revolutionary. Our task is to take the abstract knowledge that we have, and weaponize it. Because sitting here, in libraries and archives, it has no transformative value. Our job is to steal it – from academia, from jargon, from the confines of these halls literally named after colonizers – to take everything we have access to here, and weaponize it in the service of those we love.

Toward an Abolition Ecology

Abolitionist politics continue to evolve in response to the ways racial capitalism exploits, oppresses and commits violence through uneven racial development. As environmental relations have always been part of this, in this short essay, Nik Heynen starts to grapple with what an “abolition ecology” would look like.

South African Students’ Question: Remake the University or Restructure Society?

– by Alexandre Publia –
Students in South Africa demanded that Rhodes Must Fall. They led nationwide protests for education and social reform. What must fall in California?
The Rhodes Must Fall collective (RMF), which is overwhelmingly led by marginalized, Black university students, has demanded more than institutional “transformation.” Instead, they have consistently demanded total “decolonization”: a radical abolition and re-imagination of entire social structures. Other university students, like those in CA and across the U.S., have much to learn from RMF.

#ResistCapitalism to #FundBlackFutures: Black Youth, Political Economy, and the 21st Century Black Radical Imagination

– by David C. Turner III –
Critical Black Youth Politics takes all forms of resistance into account, & suggests that riots are just as important for democratic repair as nonviolent civil disobedience. … Black youth are engaging in forms of activism that deeply connect systems of oppression, especially how these systems are monetized, and no singular theoretical analysis can possibly capture all of it. Our youth are giving us new ways to re-imagine and think about the world: it’s about time we pay attention.