Kategorie: ABOLITION

Abolition, as the scholar-organizer Ruth Wilson Gilmore put it, demands that we change one thing--everything. From the insurgencies and agitation to end slavery in the nineteenth century to contemporary fights against the prison industrial complex, abolition has always been as much about what we build as it is about what we tear down. It is an insistence on a better world, free of the prison's cage and the policeman's club.

The call for prison abolition well predates the era of mass incarceration, but takes on extra urgency as state repression further extends its grasp. Fleshed out in the cell block, the city block, and the classroom, abolition is both a philosophy and a strategy. As a way of thinking, abolition is an uncompromising refusal of the violent order of things. As an approach to change, abolition insists on direct action, mutual aid, and collective provisioning against manufactured scarcity. All of us or none, the abolitionist insists; this way toward freedom. 

- Dan Berger