What is Abolition?
Abolition is a social contract in which we agree that everyone deserves to exist. Everyone should have access to clean water, nutritious food, healthcare, and other basic needs.
If you were asked, “Would you agree to have less (if it was still enough), if that meant that someone else who doesn’t have enough could survive?” most people would probably say “Yes”. If that’s true then most people are already abolitionist in spirit!
Where we need to start is by increasing empathy. It may be hard to imagine how to solve many of our social problems because it’s not that you don’t want people to thrive; it’s that you think it will cost you too much for someone else to get more. We need to create a society that frees us from dependence on the wage entirely!
We have the tools to create an abolitionist world; we just need to use the tools we have to raise up the bottom of society. No one has all the answers, and it will be a process that unfolds as we do it, but we need to do it because the goal is so worth it. In that way, abolitionists are people who haven’t given up on the world.
We also need a culture of connection. Capitalism causes alienation. What if we assumed people deserve everything and work backwards from there? Even when people fail to meet your expectations, it is often because they are drowning in this system. When you get frustrated with slow service, you aren’t seeing the service worker on the edge of tears, trying their hardest and barely making rent.
The underlying assumptions of abolition are:
We all deserve to live and have our basic needs met
Most people are doing the best we can at any given moment with what we have
We can get to a better world
We shall not police each other
We shall uphold the liberty of all
We work to free all people from all forms of oppression
We are not free until we are ALL free
Thus, abolition requires cultivating an ongoing practice of empathy. If we incorporate empathy in every action, we can build abolition from the ground up.
The Root of the Word
This movement is called abolition because it continues the work of abolition of slavery. We fight to abolish modern slavery, which includes policing, prisons, psychiatric institutions, surveillance, and dependence on the wage.
Abolition in Practice
So what would abolition look like in Santa Cruz?
Abolition is already happening in Santa Cruz with mutual aid efforts! There are many groups like People’s Aid, Love Boat, Bread and Roses, Food Not Bombs, Santa Cruz Herbal Mutual Aid, Pájaro Rising, SubRosa, Medic Coalition Santa Cruz County, and Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive In, to name a few! Direct actions, such as meeting people’s needs and doing on-the-ground case management also count.
Abolition is NOT appealing to elected officials or people in power. It is NOT asking for permission. Enslaved peoples did not get free by begging their slave masters for liberty.
Combating a Common Concern
A common retort to the abolitionist vision is a concern that people will be lazy and end up doing nothing. In studies of psychology, it is shown that most people are inherently motivated and want to contribute and create. As for tasks to meet needs that involve work “no one wants to do”, we can rely on the use of automation. Automation doesn’t have to be a bad thing if it is not coming at the cost of people’s survival.