General Defense Committee

Position paper by the GDC Abolitionist Working Group

In the United States the Black Liberation struggle has been central to nearly every potentially mass insurrectional / moment of revolutionary potential in its history. It is the tip of the spear that breaks open the cracks and openings in society that allows for potential forward movement of freedom for all oppressed people. This isn’t to say that it is the only struggle that matters – but it is the primary struggle here in the belly of the beast. The orientation and relation on the continuum of Black Liberation to White Supremacy is the critical contradiction in this society. Therefore it is a strategic priority for us to orient and focus our work with an understanding of how it furthers Black Liberation. Not just for this working group, but for all the working groups.

The Black Liberation struggle has been the vanguard of the class struggle in the US. This is not to say that “race issues” are more important than “class issues” – but that class without race is an abstraction that doesn’t exist. In the US race is the primary determinant of class. From its inception the US has been built on genocide – this was the primitive accumulation that allowed for it to become the greatest power in the world. While race has been fundamental throughout the birth and growth of capitalism world wide – in the US it has been especially powerful. The creation of the white working class as the police/slave catchers has defined its existence since the beginning. White folks were given certain privileges to play this role in the white supremacist structure (policing Black people (as well as others not construed as white).

Within the working class struggle in the US – this contradiction between Black rebellion vs white policing has been primary. So from early attempts to rebel and escape slavery, to build rebel outposts with other escaped Indigenous people and white indentured people, to the Civil War and the general strike of enslaved people to fight on the side of the union, to the early forms of Black armed self defense organization and “civil rights” movement, to the revolutionary Black left formations of the Black Panther Party and DRUM, to the urban rebellions and the growth of armed anti-colonial struggle of the Black Liberation Army and the Attica Rebellion. This struggle is traced thru the LA rebellion of 1992, to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor. All this culminated in the George Floyd Rebellion.

While serving as a catalyst for everyday (especially white) Americans to be propelled into the streets at record setting numbers, the global pandemic (COVID-19) forced the masses to view race issues/contradictions upfront. The state sanctioned murders of black lives/people became impossible to ignore. The George Floyd rebellion was both the largest protest movement in US history (there were protests in over 40 percent of all US counties) and the most destructive in terms of cost (over 1 Billion dollars in damages). For many of us this seemed like the closest opening in our lifetimes for a true insurrectionary moment. There were almost daily protests in response to police murder and white supremacy. For the first time in US history masses of white people (mostly young) joined the rebellion and protests, including fighting police, dying, going to prison, etc. The rallying cry for this movement was Defund the Police, but the political tendency at the revolutionary edge of this rebellion was Abolition. At the same time a massive counter insurgency was underway – with massive funds going to buy off BLM activists and divert the struggle to dead end policy reform, non-profits, and the democratic party. (Rise of Black counterinsurgency)

In the end we were out organized, and the movement that seemed so powerful throughout 2020 was almost nonexistent by 2021. Even at the height of the rebellion most of the revolutionary left was left to play catch up and on the sidelines, failing to have built militant grassroots radical organizations connected to the Black working class and poor people that could intervene and help the movements move beyond the limits of spontaneous rebellion. While there were many amazing experiments and attempts to build these in the heat of the struggle, in the end they failed. While the police around the US were on the defensive and under attack (both physical and in regards to funding) during 2020, we are now seeing the resurgence of the police under the leadership of the democrats, Biden, and the Black neo-colonial class.

This working group is an attempt to correct these failings of the George Floyd Rebellion and build the organization that can be prepared for the Fire Next Time!

Why Abolition

As mentioned above, Abolition is the name of the political tendency at the revolutionary edge of the George Floyd rebellion. This is both simple and complex. Essentially we recognize the current white supremacist carceral system to be the continuation of genocidal chattel slavery. Therefore we see the current Abolitionist movement as a continuation of the original Abolitionist movement to end slavery during the 19th century. After the Civil War and the legal recognition of the end of slavery – we saw the growth of an apartheid system in the form of Jim Crow. The civil rights movement of the 1960’s began as a response to this. By the end of the decade this had transformed into urban rebellions and anticolonial movements that included armed struggle. The carceral state as it exists today rose up in this moment of deindustrialization in the imperial core. The Black proletariat which had been the main economic powerhouse throughout the entire existence of the US was now less important. The question for the ruling class became “what to do with this rebellious surplus labor?” The genocidal carceral state has been a major part of the answer. The carceral state has become central to the management of the rebellious Black nation, as well as those fighting for queer liberation, indigenous autonomy, or a livable world. It is one of the main tools for disciplining the US working class in general. Therefore we see the struggle to abolish police and prisons of primary importance to destroying white supremacy and creating a classless free society. The positive vision of abolition is full communism.

At the front end it means no cops and no prisons – no campaigns to reform police and prisons. No new prisons. No new police training. No cops in schools. No cops in healthcare facilities. No cops or jails with different names. No detention in mental health care facilities. Abolition means confronting and resisting the carceral state – and abolishing its infrastructure, its funding, and the ideology that supports it. In the long term it means the development of whole new social relations and an end to capitalist exploitation and property relations. It means the abolition of gender, race, and sexuality that determine our lives – often from the womb to the tomb. It means bodily autonomy and freedom.

These new social relations are prefigured in the organizing we do now and in the institutions we build in the course of struggle. How we resolve conflicts and care for each other in the organizations and spaces we carve out is one small way we address this.

Some Conclusions

• This struggle will be waged and led by the people who are most affected by the genocidal carceral system, largely the Black proletariat. As we saw during the George Floyd rebellion – the people went far beyond the imaginary limits of the left/activists, etc. We should not pretend to offer leadership to this struggle. We must build principled relationships with the forces in motion, as well as orient to the class forces that could be the base of the next uprising.
• What GDC can offer is revolutionary organization. We can create a vehicle for mass participation and collective struggle that can be a part of overcoming the limits of spontaneous rebellion during the next phase of uprising.
• This will only be possible if we build organic connections through struggle over time in proletarian neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, and social spaces. GDC is a multiracial organization. Over the last year we have made some progress at transforming that from a vision to a reality – but we have a long way to go. All of our work must be evaluated based on whether it furthers our connections to Black proletarian resistance.
• The revolutionary abolitionist movement must center imprisoned people and create forms of organization that facilitate real participation in decision making. In conjunction with the rebellions in the streets – prisons have been the key site of struggle and rebellion. There are also layers of Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War with decades of experience fighting this beast that we would be fools not to learn from. Any revolutionary movement or organization that abandons or neglects those incarcerated during the course of that struggle aren’t revolutionary at all.
• Abolition isn’t possible without destroying capitalism. This is why we are revolutionary abolitionists. While we may fight for reforms that limit, decrease, or eliminate parts of the carceral apparatus, we do not believe this carceral system can be saved or abolished through reform. It will take revolutionary mass struggle.
• Repression was only a minor factor in defeating the George Floyd rebellion. The counter insurgency of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex/Black Neo-Colonial Class was the main force that defanged the movement. We must confront this head on. We must argue against all attempts to steer the movements down the dead end path of legislation, non-profit alternatives, and different politicians. The system is rotten and must be confronted and destroyed through grassroots proletarian mass movements that build the alternative society as we fight.
• While we argue that the Black proletariat is the vanguard of this struggle – we also argue that it is to the benefit of all working class people to abolish white supremacy, capitalism and carceral state. During the George Floyd rebellion we saw white race traitors join the struggle in numbers unseen in US history. The 92 LA rebellion was viewed as a Black rebellion, but the majority of those arrested during the course of that struggle were Latinx folks. Historically, white workers in the US have chosen the side of the bosses against the rest of the working class. For this they have been paid psychological and material benefits. These benefits, so-called “wages of whiteness”, are in decline. We must build a mass movement that embraces all who recognize the need to abolish capitalism and are willing to fight on the side of Black rebellion.

Activity

Research	Identify and connect with organizations and individuals involved in revolutionary abolitionist work, anti-police organizing, prisoner organizing, etc.
Survival Programs/Outreach	Develop and run survival programs that address the carceral state and put us in the mix with class forces identified above. For example: Pullover Prevention (POP).
Outreach and Collaboration with Incarcerated People	Begin the work of developing principled relationships with incarcerated comrades. Take steps to build meaningful forms of organization, participation, and leadership between folks on the outside and the inside. For example: Outside/Inside Study Groups. Develop networks of support and mutual aid for family members of incarcerated people.
Protest/Direct Action	Organize direct action and mass struggle in response to police murder and violence. Collaborate with families of victims and organizations where we are aligned to increase the cost of white supremacist police violence. Offer mutual aid and support to families and victims of police violence.
Political Education	Develop public facing and internal political education programming of all types to build our capacity and ability to engage this work more meaningfully and bring people we engage in struggle with from the periphery to the core. This includes social media, public and internal theory nights and reading groups, production of posters and pamphlets, and consistent production for Fight To Win GDC street paper.