The abolition I speak of somehow, perhaps magically (meaning we don’t yet know how, which is what magic is, what we don’t know how to explain yet)—the abolition I speak of somehow, perhaps magically, resists division from class struggle and also refuses all the other kinds of power difference combinations that, when fatally coupled, spark new drives for abolition. Abolition is a totality and it is ontological. It is the context and content of struggle, the site where culture recouples with the political; but it is not struggle’s form. To have form, we have to organize.
From “What Is to Be Done?” speech given in 2011 as President of the American Studies Association, as published in Abolition Geography: essays towards freedom by Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Pages 41-42. Verso Books. 2022.
Which I’ll complement with this 2023 interview on On Being.
Organize, organize, organize from Birmingham to Buffalo and beyond.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 