9/11 - Socialism 2023 Reflections
“And what is an enemy if we do not know who our friends are” - For Sonia by aja monet
During my first week of graduate school, I had the opportunity to attend Haymarket’s Socialism 2023 conference and meet people from across the world committed to making the world a more revolutionary place. I was able to join sessions on teaching behind bars, indigenous land acknowledgment, abolition, organizing, disability politics, racial capitalism, sex work and migration, and poetry. Best of all, I was able to attend Dream Defenders Sunday School and hear some amazing voices behind the movement for Black Lives. I also had the opportunity to see so many of the scholar-activists whose work informs the way that I think about life, protests, and politics like Angela Davis, Bettina Love, Bill Ayers, Barbara Ransby, Robyn Maynard, Harsha Walia, Da’Shaun Harrison, and Beth Ritchie. I was also able to hear some of the voices behind the #stopcopcity movement of Atlanta argue that we are at war. I wanted to drop some of my takeaways from this conference, by session. (Forgive me I did not expect it to be this long at first, feel free to skip around) The biggest takeaway from the entire conference for me was that struggle is beautifully poetic. Black struggle is, as George Jackson states in Blood in My Eye, love inspired but not to be romanticized for it is also violent, organized, and physically and emotionally taxing. As far as format, each bullet point comes from one of the sessions I took part in.
Chicago has always been a city built on settler colonialism. Prior to the settling of Chicago by Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the wilderness of Chicago was the homeland of the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nation, amongst many other indigenous tribes. Indigenous communities have long gone through linguistic erasure through English education programs, many of them having their native languages taken from them by the U.S. education system. In many ways the indigenous presence in the city has been invisibilized, but they are still here. I was also intrigued to hear, activists and co-founder of First Nations Garden, Fawn Pochel ask, “Can decolonization truly happen within Western institutions like schools?” Fawn shared that many institutions make use of the indigenous practice of land acknowledgment without actively helping or consulting indigenous communities. Fawn argued many of these schools like UIC should begin to offer reparations to indigenous communities whose land they occupy. (Beyond Land Acknowledgment, Socialism 2023, Lakota Youth Development)
While attending the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project panel I was able to see several scholar and art activists give their perspectives on teaching inside of Illinois prison systems. UIC CLJ professor Beth Ritchie talked about the importance of being in and not of the academy and the ways that teaching in prison allows her to be a different kind of teacher. When addressing his experiences teaching in the Illinois Prisons, educator Bill Ayers states, “That’s what teaching ought to be. We learn more than we teach.” The panelists and other educators in the room shared their struggles teaching in carceral spaces and how important co-learning and participation are to teaching in prisons. This can be very useful for teaching in public schools which in many ways function like prisons. Teaching gave them opportunities to engage in non-hierarchal ways of learning and forced them to constantly think on their feet because of the constant changing of prison standards. Most notably were the barriers that they revealed were present in prisons from the state personnel antagonizing and surveilling them to the ways that resistance and destabilization were constantly mobilized by prison guards. In some ways, they talked about having to tip-toe the line of complicity while having to work from within the prison system's guidelines. I was also able to hear beautiful testimony from those who benefited from the education. I recall one person saying, “When I learned how to read, It became a necessity to escape.” He reminded me of my reading of Fredrick Douglass and how education is always a fugitive act for Black folx. (Teaching Toward Freedom From Behind Bars, Socialism 2023, Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project (PNNAP)
According to Canadian abolitionist Robyn Maynard, “Criminalization is a kind of racial violence that ought to be included in abolition.” While in my third session, I learned that some carceral feminists use abolition as a framework to criminalize sex work. The panelists forced me to question what would happen if sex workers were able to unionize. There are many feminists and abolitionists who would use protection as a mask to further criminalize sex workers, who are inherently connected to immigrants. How are rhetorics of safety used to mobilize to criminalize certain communities like sex workers? We need protections for migrant workers, and they need public access to resources, not more prisons. The concept of migrant workers, like borders is a state-constructed concept holding no real meaning other than to oppress, seperate, and harm. We need protections for all workers and this includes sex workers. “Criminal law is the biggest enemy of sex work” - Elene Lam (Sex Work, Policing, and Border Abolition, Socialism 2023)
How is criminalization used under the mask of care for neuro-divergent individuals? What other means are there to support those with mental illness without having to put them in an institution that creates medical zombies and feeds the growth of the prison industrial complex? In many ways, the state practices carceral sanism under the guise of treatment harming many of the people it claims to help. Sanism is inherently linked to white supremacy, anti-blackness, transphobia, and ableism! Why are so many liberal states like New York and California turning to force to solve neurodivergent issues and homelessness? In September 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom created a bill creating care courts. A court system that would essentially allow the state court system to deal with severe mental health needs like schizophrenia into state housing. UIC Professor Ben-Moshe argues that we must take an abolitionist stance on institutionalization and push to eradicate these psychiatric institutions that are creating more harm for those with diverse mental health needs. We must move towards peer-led noncarceral interventions rather than relying on psychiatry to exercise powers of control.
Carceral Sanism: The practice that makes it seem like disabled people need medical intervention. The ways that the state exercises pathologization and medicalization as a way to expand the carceral state.
Medicalization: the process of policing, and controlling those for medical reasons.
Carcerality: Confinement and capture
The Poetics of Social Movements w/Aja Monet and Robin D.G. Kelley
“We have not truly created the mechanisms by which we can learn to deeply listen to each other”
“Artists are only as good as the people that engage with the Art…If the Art is not speaking directly to the issues we are facing and helping us grapple with the questions at hand then what are we doing?” - Aja Monet
“Language is a way for us to arrange our worlds. There is something very powerful about improvisation. Words are only approximation of ideas.” - Aja Monet
MFA programs were invented by the CIA to fight propaganda during the communist era.
“How does love materialize for you and what does love become? Love is fundamental to how social movements function. If love is not a part of praxis, it will fail. Love = the struggle w/ ideas, w/ our expression of ideas.”
Movement Ethos and Cop City
“There’s no abolishing cop city without abolishing Atlanta.” I was fortunate enough to sit through Scalawag’s #StopCopCity session where they talked about so many things that are relevant to the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta. They specifically talked to the ways that guerilla warfare, policing, abolition, and anti-blackness are central to the struggles in Atlanta. Cop City is quite literally the manifestation of environmental racism, white supremacist media, and anti-black state terrorism as the state intends to construct a policing facility by destroying forests near a predominantly Black community. Activist Miliaku Nwabueze stated clearly, “We are not building a movement so the media can look on us favorably.” In many ways, the media apparatus works to codify and cultivate the ideology of the state and makes it easier for negative interpretations in public discourse regarding the movement. Drawing from the works of George Jackson, Joy James, and Frantz Fanon these activist scholars talked about the necessity of abolishing the state and reimaging resistance through an abolitionist anarchistic framework. Below find a couple of my notes and key takeaways from the editors of Scalawag as well as activists in the movement.
We can’t create a binary of deserving and undeserving or criminal and non-criminal even though the media and state would like us to make these distinctions.
Abolishing the state is crucial to abolishing cop city. The culture must go first when it comes to abolition. What does the abolition of the carceral culture and the culture of aggression look like?
The media machine serves the city and relies on the manufacturing of common sense, so we must rely on word of mouth.
We need to be cognizant of how neoliberal logic and engagement are brought into movement spaces. “Why does a meeting feel too much like a meeting and not a gathering?”
The past is not a blueprint that we can copy and paste. We must learn from the past not repeat it.
A movement ethos that mobilizes children and uses all tools at our disposal is crucial. This movement would not have been possible without multilevel organizing like direct militant action as well as research and canvassing.
Urban Warfare is important! Organizing in grocery stores and barbershops must happen.
How is social justice sold as a commodity through Black Capitalism? Would that even be considered social justice?
“What is the function of writing? To incite!”
We are at war! Whether people completely understand this or not is crucial. We are overworked, desensitized, and looking over so many of these issues that may end our world as we know it.
Aja Monet
Please check out the work of surrealist blues poet aja monet! She is amazing, powerful, and kinetic. I have attached pieces of two of her poems below. Please check out the work of surrealist blues poet aja monet! She is amazing, powerful, and kinetic. I have attached pieces of two of her poems below.
the devil you know- aja monet
The devil you know
Taxes the air we breathe
Privatizes the water
Profits of homelessness
Strangles the land and injects hormones in animals
Rapes the people and rewards the rich
Charges you
For being sick
Sends a bill to your loved ones with interest when you die
Laughs at us coughing up our lungs
Gulping water, lead dripping off our chins
Buys private ships to the moon
Dancing with your demons
The selfish, individualistic part of you
The one who rather not have a foot on your neck
Or who shows up to the rally
After sipping sweet comfort at a corporate gig
That pays you just enough to die a little slower
Tired and community fostering care
How being black
Or woman
Or queer
Or trans
Or other
Or human
Or inhumane
….
Part of For Sonia - aja monet
,,,
Life can get you down and out
But when the organizers was weary
And all the marching wore them down
And all the meetings ended in arguments
And all the foundations bought out the snakes
And all the trauma piled up on their desks
And all the campaigns ended with politicians
I offered, i offered
Poems in their palms like petunias revolutionary
And blushing shades of plum
I fed them Sonia
And
Jane
And
June
And
Pat Parker
And
Carolyn Rodgers
How every poem still pierces true
Like yesterdays battlefield is tomorrows front yard
Still
Still, all my hero's is fighting depression
Some live to see what they fought to prevent
And we ought to keep our hopes high
But all this comfort and security got our institutions
Kidnapped in broad daylight treaty torn
And tricked
…
