Some concerns regarding abolition.
A thread.

Obviously, abolishing prisons and police would be a wonderful thing, but I'm finding certain problems in the framework of "abolition" that are setting us up for failure.
1/
Reading the following from Saidiya Hartman crystallized it for me. The 19th century abolitionist movement was controlled by white progressives. They didn't want to talk about taking the war to the bankers, merchants, & landowners nor to center armed resistance by enslaved people.
They wanted to use morally exemplary individuals, some sacrificed victim as posterchild, to appeal to their compatriots' conscience and allow the State to enact a change.
But slavery had become essential to the new economies of Africa and the Americas,
3/
and it continued after the transatlantic trade was abolished. Abolishing slavery inside Africa was used a justification for the full colonization of the continent in the late 1800s. "Bringing civilization" in the European imaginary.
4/
A pragmatic anticapitalist in 1790 would have been unable to imagine global capitalism without the slave trade, to predict the prison-industrial complex or the Berlin Conference. But abolition, as opposed to total insurrection, paved the way.
5/
Nowadays, those of us in the know realize you can't have capitalism without police and prisons. Abolition is really just a code word for revolution. So why don't we talk about revolution, about taking the war to bankers, real estate investors, and tech billionaires?
6/
Why do so few abolitionists center the struggles of prison rebels and antipolice rioters?
I think universities and NGOs have played a huge role, convincing abolitionists to particularize their desires, to favor legal over fiery language, and to present separated areas of analysis and action that, in the end, can become demands.
8/
In effect, translating it into a language legible to power.

Will this come back and bite us? Do we really want to tempt the future and find out what could be even worse than police and prisons?
9/
2020 already showed us the slippery slope from revolution to abolition to defunding to decreased funding, now an uninspiring-enough rallying cry that the movement fizzles and leaves the door open for the right-wing reaction (and newly increased police budgets).
10/
We're not being realistic by not talking about revolution or trying to appear sober and respectable (to whom?). Total revolution *is* the realistic path. Everything else is negotiated surrender.
We want to get rid of all of it. Every last vestige of the State and capital. Own it.

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More from @PeterGelderloos

12 Oct
To see things clearly, one needn't read Galeano, Vine Deloria Jr, Howard Zinn. Colombo supported mutilations, land theft, total slavery, and sex slavery for children in his f*cking diary.
#NothingtoCelebrate

This demonstrates the limits of debate.
Anyone who negates the genocidal reality of Columbus, the US, whiteness, the bourgeoisie: those aren't beliefs that deserve respect. They're alibis to facilitate life in a world constructed by mass murderers like Columbus (and George Washington)
2/
and to justify receiving some of the bloody profits.

It's good to have the books and studies, but unless we constitute ourselves as a force to destroy this world, the white supremacist histories and identities won't disappear.
Read 4 tweets
11 Oct
When I got to one thousand followers, I sent out a booty shot. I don't know what you're supposed to do at 10k, so I'm going to send out

*Kill Anarchist Idols*
A Thread:
If we're on here to spread anarchist ideas (is that why we're on here?), it helps to have some larger accounts because of the way Twitter is structured. But it's probably not a great idea for those accounts to be in the hands of a few individuals.
2/
At the bottom of the thread, I'm going to send out a list of collective accounts to follow, but first I want to problematize certain ideas of power.
3/
Read 15 tweets
5 Oct
There's a great morass of misinformation around yesterday's "anarchist gulags in Catalunya" crap, which is not surprising, given it came from authoritarian socialists deflecting from their history of systematic repression and murder.

Thread: Repression in an anarchist revolution
The most true thing about the shitposting is that anarchists generally responded: if anarchists really did set up gulags in 1936, that was wrong of them;
whereas the authoritarian socialists could neither offer a self-critique of their own history nor an honest critique of their opponents. This openness to analysis and self-critique, the insistence on uniting means and ends, is why I am an anarchist.
Read 21 tweets
3 Oct
When someone responds to criticisms of industrialism with cries of "primitivist" it's a safe bet they won't engage in good faith and they don't have a nuanced critique.
In this case, I don't think they're even anticapitalist if they think: Image
industrialism "lift[s] people out of extreme poverty", that you can't provide universal public housing without concrete, and that "rural poverty" is something that exists naturally rather than being a feature of industrialization itself.
And then there's the bizarre take that "all" nuclear waste could fit in a single room and can be "disposed" of safely.
Read 4 tweets
3 Oct
Thread:
This excellent book looks at the impact of European slaving in Africa, the loss of the past for enslaved people, the predation of African states against stateless peoples, the limitations of independence in West Africa, and the fate of Pan-Africanism.
West African states and aristocracies attained immense power and wealth through the slave trade, but all of this was wiped out by the way Africa was forcibly integrated into the "global" (colonial/neocolonial) economy,
with the most widespread African currency being stripped of its value then illegalized by European colonizers almost overnight.
In effect, European colonizers produced wealth through the slave trade that they used to fuel further wealth production, state-building, and war-making,
Read 6 tweets
21 Sep
So: there is a high possibility of a global economic collapse in the next 10 years (or weeks). There are more and more fronts of systemic instability, and global supply chains are simultaneously very very long and very very skinny (without the redundancies of healthy networks).
If it happens, national govts will have to intervene in some capacity. This could be as extreme as a full mobilization of the emergency management paradigm, w/ military in the streets and govt distribution of essential supplies/direction of production & distribution.
In most places, we're not currently strong enough to oppose this directly, although experiences show we will have a great capacity to develop mutual aid initiatives more effective than the govt survival infrastructure.
Read 6 tweets

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