I’m trying to figure out a way of conceptualizing and researching what I’m imagining as abolition economies. So here’s how I’m thinking about it now. Prisons and exclusionary/punitive migration policy are technologies of dispossession that deepen existing racial and class relations. For example, felon disenfranchisement and nationalistic regulation on employment make it exceedingly difficult to work, as an employee or in licensed trades. So what do folks do to make a living, and how can these alternative economies be built on as a source of resistance to the systems of oppression and dispossession? Kernels for these ideas come from a conversation I had a couple years ago when I first visited New Orleans and interviewed Shana Griffin of the New Orleans Women’s Health Clinic (unfortunately now closed, it seems). She told me that part of ending violence against women meant rebuilding community economies and infrastructures. If we were to think about community gardens or neighborhood businesses, within this thought are responses to the structural violence of hunger, of industrial food production, the economic exchanges that can circulate in a neighborhood rather than through big box chains, the social ties that can be fostered through particular community institutions, etc. And this can be the case with prison-siting, too. Since the 80s, prisons and contracting for prisoners have been sold/used as a form of economic development, but places that are already poor when they build a prison stay just as poor; this is a nutshell of Gregory Hooks’ research. I’m paraphrasing, but Ruthie Gilmore once pointed out that unplanned distribution of a pot of money to folks living around a prison would be a more effective economic development model. The point is that much better can be done than that or prisons, so that’s where she looks at what she calls grassroots planning – what are the alternative futures that people want to create for themselves, their kids, and their communities?
Cultural economies can be an important aspect of this project. My conversation with Nick @ Appalshop about cultural work and youth media education and time in New Orleans help make these connections real. Fatalistic resignation to a future of harmful industries and livelihoods rests on a naturalization of these harms (fatalism and fatality). And it rests on forgetting past struggles and losses – remembering a struggle that was lost or crushed is entirely different than thinking that there has never been opposition and no possibility for change. The dispossession of memory is a dispossession of histories of creativity, identity, and struggles as a resource for change. Creative projects can recognize and revalue this past and present are part of the capacity of resisting more harms. Finding that one has a claim on a place and a future goes hand in hand with finding how one’s going to make that claim. Is it writing, film, music, community building, documentation, poetry, what all? If, it seems to me, alienation from cultural production is a huge part of how people can be rendered politically passive, creating the conditions for expression and change is part of people coming to learn their power. So the young person who decides to make music rather than follow the well-worn paths to prison or the military or other harmful industry can be read as an act of refusal. When consciously and collectively acted on, this can be a prefigurative project of bringing into the world the future one wants. This same idea I also experienced in Asheville and Athens around locally grown food. And in New Orleans, where I write this post, Jordan Flaherty tells me that cultural workers are central to rebuilding community institutions. This is as much about the amazing arts that are produced here as the social sensibilities and relations that are created.
I’m talking mostly about the practices and social relations of these intentional economies, but a perfect illustration is a bag I am taking with me across the country. Just before leaving on this trip, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, and I were talking about the effects of migration policy, the appalling situation for migrants in Europe, and immigrant activism and solidarity.* At some point the conversation came to networks of mutual aid and solidarity, and Silvia brought out this bag. It was made by women who had been arrested in the New Bedford, Mass. ICE raid @ a factory making materiel for the US military. Most of the women arrested are from Guatemala, a place in which the US has a sordid history of military and economic interventions. The bags are a project of forged out of necessity, which also capture multiple layers of displacement, violence, and dispossession. But they are also a kernel of anti-violence and facilitate circuits of a solidarity economy.
With that, off to a night of music to raise money to re-open Charity Hospital.
*Here’s an email I just received for a day of upcoming actions in Italy:
CALL Antiracism ROME
October 17
National events
PIAZZA
DELLA REPUBBLICA 14.30
,1989 Hundreds of thousands take to the streets in
Rome for the first major demonstration against racism.
On 24 August of that year at Villa Literno, in the province of Caserta, had been killed a South African refugee, Jerry Essan Masslo. Just 20 years later, racism has not been defeated, continues to cause fatalities, and is powered by the Berlusconi
government. The security package passed by the center-right government offends
human dignity, introducing the crime of "illegal immigration". The death of
immigrants in the Sicilian Channel, which is turning into a graveyard marine, is
the tragic result of the inhuman logic that guides government policy. This
dramatic situation is dangerously in society and legitimating fueling the fear
and violence against any diversity. It 'time to react and build together a great
response and solidarity to fight to defend human rights by rejecting any kind of
racism.
Therefore we appeal to all secular and religious associations, trade
unions, civil society and all movements to the streets October 17 to stop
the spread of racism based on this platform:
* No racism
* For the legalization generalized for all
* security
* Reception Retreat Package
* No for all the rejections and the bilateral agreements providing
for them
* For the clean break of the link between residence permits and
employment contracts
* Right of asylum for refugees and displaced
* To the final closure of the Centers for identification and expulsion
(CEI)
* No divisions between Italians and foreigners
* Right to employment, health, housing and education for all
* Maintenance of the residence permit for those who have lost their jobs
* against all forms of discrimination against LGBT* Solidarity with all workers fighting to defend work
No comments:
Post a Comment