No borders! No prisons! No cops! No war! No state?

A transcript of this event is available here (PDF).

Beautiful visual notes by Lizartistry are available here. Thank you Lizartistry for creating this resource!

RESOURCE LIST
The following is a list of links and resources that were either mentioned during the conversation or otherwise recommended by the speakers.

• Abolition and the State: A Discussion Tool by Interrupting Criminalization
• Video: The Role of the State in Abolitionist Futures featuring Andrea Ritchie, Robyn Maynard, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
• Website: Warrior Publications by Gord Hill
• Book: Pan-African Social Ecology by Modibo Kadalie
• Book: Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security by Todd Miller
• Essay: The Dragon and the Hydra by Russell Maroon Shoatz
• Book: The Anti-Fascist Handbook by Mark Bray
• Essay: Anarchy Can’t Fight Alone by Kuwasi Balagoon
• Short essay: A Note on the ‘Failed State’ by William C. Anderson in Offshoot
• Historical document: Aimé Césaire’s Letter to Maurice Thorez (PDF) (resignation from the French Communist Party)
• Book: Anarchism and the Black Revolution by Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin
• Essay: No Escaping the State: The Story of Lovett Fort-Whiteman by William C. Anderson in Roar

Audience Questions:
The following is a list of questions generated by the audience for Q&A.

• How do the speakers define the state as opposed to collective governance? That is to say, where is the line where collective decision-making becomes state-like?
• How are you defining “state”? Are Indigenous nations “states”? Does abolition require eliminating all forms of states, governments, and legal systems, including Native nations?
• What to do about those parts of humanity, hurt, unhealed… that can make us fail ourselves and others? How to develop forms of governance that help us navigate that?
• How do you envisage collective governance being coordinated so as to meet people’s needs? And within “collective governance”, what ensures that the provision of services is fair and even?
• How should anti-state abolitionists relate to statist ‘abolitionists’?
• How do we address the rise of Stalinism amongst the youth due to groups like the PSL?
• How do we think about the distribution of resources? Particularly when the state takes and hoards our resources.
• Isn’t massive resource reallocation between people necessary and if so, how does that occur without the recognized authority of the state (assuming the state could be leveraged for such a purpose)?
• I’d love to hear more thought on how we coordinate effort to the scales needed.
• People may have the knowledge and skills to do the work they have done under the State… but without the State where would we get the materials, resources, and money to supply the people?
• Should we make demands on the existing state in order to siphon resources to communities?
• Is the state in the USA and Cuba basically the same? How, if at all, are they different?
• Is the idea that in this post state collective governance, redistribution will all be voluntary?
• In my research with Canadian public sector actors, it’s been revealing to find many actors not locating possibilities for equitable change and effective crisis response in the state. Instead, many public sector actors have located these possibilities in communities. What are your reflections on the role of public sector workers given their discretionary power in decisions that deeply shape everyday life?
• How does the electoral system factor into the path toward abolition, if at all?
• Is this possible without completely abandoning capitalism? Do we imagine mutual aid coexisting alongside capitalism? What happens with the wildly imbalanced allocation of state of resources?
• Given the spectre of nuclear war, wouldn’t nuclear weapons need to be dismantled around the planet in order for such countries as the U.S. to be dissolved?
• Do you think people turn their ideological affinities into religious commitments because they don’t have anything else to fill that need?
• How do you address fellow leftists who don’t believe in police/prison abolitionism? Who think that democratic councils that hold police accountable and make it less violent and that’s enough?

Event Description

Many new people are thinking together about what their lives and communities might look like without the violent apparatuses of their governments caging, deporting, and deploying people. Among abolitionists an important question lurks: are we trying to take over our governments, or get rid of them? When we imagine a world without cops, soldiers and cages, do we still imagine having nation states? Is this question different for people who are living under settler colonial governments, such as those in the US and Canada, versus for others? Some people imagine that the state can become a source of care-taking (distributing healthcare, education, housing), and worry that the state is the only thing that can do such care-taking “to scale.” Others argue that state care-taking programs are racialized and gendered, structured to stabilize extractive systems, and should be replaced with decentralized mutual aid networks. This event gathers three leading thinkers whose work questions the desire to take over the state, to discuss the stakes of this question for abolitionist work right now.

This event is made possible by the Patricia Wismer Professorship in Gender and Diversity at Seattle University.

About the Speakers

William C. Anderson is a writer and activist from Birmingham, Alabama. His work has appeared in The Guardian, MTV, Truthout, British Journal of Photography, and Pitchfork, among others. He is the author of The Nation on No Map (AK Press 2021) and co-author of  As Black as Resistance (AK Press 2018). He’s also the co-founder of Offshoot Journal and provides creative direction as a producer of the Black Autonomy Podcast. His writings have been included in the anthologies, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? (Haymarket 2016) and No Selves to Defend (Mariame Kaba 2014).

[Update 11/15/22: Unfortunately, Gord Hill is not able to attend the discussion tonight.]
Gord Hill is the author of The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book, The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book, and The Antifa Comic Book. He is a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw nation whose territory is located on northern Vancouver Island and adjacent mainland in the province of “British Columbia.” He has been involved in Indigenous people’s and anti-globalization movements since 1990.

Dean Spade has been working in movements to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He is a Professor at Seattle University School of Law and the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!,” and the creator of the mutual aid toolkit at BigDoorBrigade.com. His latest book is Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next).

Harsha Walia is a Panjabi writer and organizer based in Vancouver, Coast Salish territories and rooted in migrant justice, anti racist, feminist, abolitionist, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist movements and communities for over two decades. She is also the author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (2021) and Undoing Border Imperialism (2013), and co-author of “Never Home: Legislating Discrimination in Canadian Immigration”, as well as “Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.”

Accessibility

Live transcription and ASL interpretation will be provided. Please email any additional access needs to skreitzb@barnard.edu.

This event is free and open to all.