ABOLITION
EVERYDAY SH!T: THE PILOT ISSUE
Content Notice: state repression, co-optation, counterinsurgency
Collective Mapping of Philadelphia’s Abolitionist Timeline Activity, Spring 2025, Abolition School
“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” —Deleuze & GuattariAbolition is a brick—but does that mean it’s for building, or is it for throwing? To be clear, what concerns us are the very real courthouses that W.E.B. Du Bois had identified, in The Souls of Black Folk, as the “universal device” for the “reenslaving the blacks”—and which housed courts not of reason but of color, which in his words “settled a man’s conviction on almost any charge.” As in so many ways, Du Bois here provides a key bridge between abolition past—the abolition of slavery—and abolition present: the racialized apparatus of carceral power that emerged after the Civil War and has only gained strength and breadth in the 150 years since.
So what kind of a brick is abolition? This question gains a more specific and urgent weight in the aftermath of the 2020 rebellions, which launched the question of abolition into the political mainstream for the first time (or the second time, really). Insurgency brings counterinsurgency, and more often than not, this counterinsurgency takes two forms. On the one hand, and in the first instance, the system responds with brute repressive force. But increasingly, the iron fist wears the velvet glove of liberal counterinsurgency through infiltration and cooptation. 2020 saw both, but while repression is often easier to recognize—leaders and participants targeted for arrest or attacked by white vigilantes in the streets—liberal counterinsurgency can fly under the radar and even appear as a victory and accomplishment of our movements.
Now to be clear, the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were suddenly interested in abolition was an accomplishment of our movements and a measure of our power in the streets. But, understood dialectically, it’s also much more than that. Of course, it’s a good thing that everyone was suddenly an abolitionist, but when this everyone includes liberals and nonprofits, professors and universities, we naturally have questions to ask, and one question most of all: what do we meanwhen we say abolition? Against contemporary attempts to water down abolition, to co-opt it in the service of power, to render it harmless, reformist, or gradualist, and to make it compatible with the status quo, we need to be clear: the brick of abolition is definitely not for building courthouses—the recent trend of electing radical district attorneys notwithstanding. When it comes to courthouses, abolition means smashing windows and more, dismantling the very foundations.
“But here’s the weird thing: smashing windows is the easiest thing, which is why it’s only the smallest of first steps. Abolition means tearing down the whole building, prying it apart brick from brick.”But here’s the weird thing: smashing windows is the easiest thing, which is why it’s only the smallest of first steps. Abolition means tearing down the whole building, prying it apart brick from brick. And the closer we get to the foundations, the higher the wreckage piles all around us, something peculiar happens. It becomes clear that we have more than just two options, and that the relationship between destroying and building is not one of simple opposition: not all bricks are for courthouses—we too need to build. The question is what to build and how, and how to build without abandoning the need to also throw bricks. Abolition is a brick that needs to do both. This is the clearest lesson that abolition present must learn from abolition past: that abolition will inevitably fail if it is not also an ambitious and far-reaching process of social reconstruction.
Spring 2025 Abolition School Leadership Team (from left to right): DJ Graves, Intern; Christopher R. Rogers, Facilitator; Geo Maher, Coordinator; Ant Smith, Facilitator; Talia Charidah, Fellow; Nneka Azuka, Fellow.
Enter the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, or Abolition School. In Philadelphia, the 2020 rebellions lasted not days but entire months—reignited in October by the murder of Walter Wallace Jr. in West Philly—and shook the city to its worm-eaten core. We saw both forms of counterinsurgency up close: much of the city remained under National Guard occupation for weeks, and several of those present—including our own Abolition School facilitator Ant Smith—were targeted and ultimately jailed by the Feds. But we also saw the flood of nonprofit and university money dedicated to watering-down the language of abolition in the service of the status quo—leading even many revolutionaries to wonder whether the language of abolition is even worth the trouble.
Both forms of counterinsurgency conspired to demobilize the people, by picking off leaders to make an example of, and by reframing a threatened hegemonic narrative to convince us that we had gotten out of hand and demanded too much—and particularly amidst a Covid-era spike in violence in the city, this argument gained significant traction.
So we confronted two challenges:
- the perennial question of what to do after the upsurge, in the moment of downturn, with those energies and people who had been mobilized; and
- the more specific question posed by the mainstreaming of abolition, which demanded new debates around precisely what abolition means and what would be required to make it real.
At the Du Bois Movement School, our answer to both is the same: political education as political organization. We pursue this according to four rough principles: we are abolitionists, which we understand to always also be a process of reconstruction; we are internationalists, because the systems we confront are global and our best resistance is solidarity across borders; we do intersectional education, because we know that capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy emerged together through colonial expansion; and we do participatory education because our goal is to train those movement intellectuals capable of leading the struggles on the horizon. This is not education for education’s sake: as we often insist, we study the world to change it.
“This is not education for education’s sake: as we often insist, we study the world to change it.”For us, this project responds to both of the challenges posed above. First, it catches and gathers those mobilized by abolitionist struggles, bringing aspiring organizers together from struggles across the city and beyond, thereby building intersectional and international solidarity in practice through the hard work of studying together. Secondly, it does so with an eye toward clarifying and sharpening our understanding of abolition into a fundamentally revolutionary approach, grounded in global anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism, with reconstruction serving as code for the ongoing struggle to rebuild (and defend) community from the wreckage capitalism has wrought worldwide. Against those who either seek to neutralize abolition in the service of the status quo, or who reject it as insufficiently radical, we respond with an educational practice that ensures it remains faithful to its most intransigently revolutionary roots.
In the year of my birth, Audre Lorde famously wrote that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”—a phrase that has been used and abused ad infinitum since. Perhaps the best indicator of the perils of cooptation is the way that this phrase, meant as a warning against the institutionalization of radicalism in academia and the watering-down of Black feminism by the status quo, has been transformed so thoroughly into a neoliberal proverb to be deployed against any and all collective resistance. The reality is that tools are tools, that they change meaning dramatically when stolen away from the master, and that the master’s house is nothing more than a pile of bricks.
Abolition finds its truest and most radical meaning when it is firmly in the hands of oppressed communities in struggle. Only then will it be the brick we truly need.
“Abolition finds its truest and most radical meaning when it is firmly in the hands of oppressed communities in struggle. Only then will it be the brick we truly need.”Geo Maher, Coordinator, W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction
Geo Maher, Ph.D., is a writer, organizer, and popular educator who has taught in colleges and universities, in prisons, and in the barrios of Caracas, Venezuela—learning an immense amount from his students in the process. Growing up poor in the Maine woods, he was taught at an early age to despise oppression, and found early inspiration in local and global struggles against capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy—and in the revolutionary internationalist vision for a new world that those who fight continue to carry in their hearts. He is the author of five books, including A World Without Police and Anticolonial Eruptions.