George Ciccariello-Maher and Jeff St. Andrews (Re-published on occasion of the prison strike, August 21st to September 9th, 2018. Originally published in Counterpunch. Download the pamphlet version here.) Note: We wrote this piece seven years ago, but for white supremacy, the past …
[This interview by Jared Ware with an organizer from Jailhouse Lawyers Speak is re-posted from Shadowproof. The Abolition collective aims to amplify the voices of incarcerated folks who are organizing the prison strike from August 21st to September 9th.] A little over one week …
Read more‘I’m for Disruption’: Interview with Prison Strike Organizer from Jailhouse Lawyers Speak
by Paul Raekstad
Abstract:
In recent years, radical movements from the Arab Spring to Occupy and beyond have been calling for “democracy.” These movements also claim to reject representation—a keystone of many contemporary liberal understandings of democracy. How can we make sense of this? There is ongoing debate about this in these movements and their descendants, part of which consists in figuring out what we should take “democracy” to mean. This article tries to contribute to this process of collective self-clarification by reconstructing one notion of what we could take “democracy” to mean. Thereafter, we will see how we can use this concept to make sense of the critique of representation in many contemporary radical movements and how useful it can be for helping to guide social change and the practices seeking to bring it about. I will thus argue that a coherent conception of democracy can be found, and that it can be a powerful tool both for understanding and critiquing the shortcomings of contemporary societies and for guiding our efforts to overcome them.
The collective of Abolition: Journal of Insurgent Politics stands in solidarity with ongoing organizing with the planned August 21st, 2018 nationwide prison strike. Importantly, this movement is diffuse – a critical and primary tactic for organizing across and inside carceral lines, however demarcated.
by Liz Mason-Deese. December in Buenos Aires is known for its propensity to heat up. It was the eruption of protests on December 19th and 20th sixteen years ago that overthrew the neoliberal government of Fernando de la Rúa. Those days saw the …
by Sara C. Motta
We remain in body and spirit, despite the violence injected in our bones, hearts and wombs by the racist patriarchal capitalist-colonial system.
Our rage is a palpable and righteous response to this violence. But new worlds cannot be built on rage alone. Our struggle to move from survival to flourishing can be nurtured by and through decolonising love.
Tentative Program
Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota
October 6-8, 2017
This manifesto is a demand to finally have our voices heard, as well as a call to action to resist the neoliberal forces encroaching on our university that are increasingly present in higher education systems worldwide.
On May 17, 2017, I traveled with a group of students to the University of California Regents meeting in San Francisco. Originally, we had planned to speak in the “public comment” portion of the meeting, in protest against the Board of Regents and the UC Office of the President (UCOP). However, because of strict security measures, few of us spoke at all. Our experiences being silenced and policed are not unusual and reflect a decades-long struggle against corruption in the UC system, alongside worsening conditions of inequity, social injustice, and a lack of transparency.