206 pages
Published March 10, 2021 by Haymarket Books.
A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer and educator Mariame Kaba.
“Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.”
What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle.
With a foreword by Naomi Murakawa and chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, …
A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer and educator Mariame Kaba.
“Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.”
What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle.
With a foreword by Naomi Murakawa and chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba’s work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world. As Kaba writes, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.”
As a white person learning about abolitionist thought and finding ways that I can, with chronic illnesses, be part of this movement, reading this book (and listening, I read part of it via audiobook) both challenged and encouraged me. There is something to be said about firmness, unflinching truthfulness, and boundaries: they are kindness like no other. I will read this book again.
Transformative justice, repairing relationships, redesigning society systemically, accountability for harms. Prisons had to be imagined; prisons were a reform, and like other reforms that leave in place the system of punitive surveillance, control, and violence they don't promote justice for so many harms, while harming more. We can imagine so many alternatives. We don't believe the world will change if we can just change enough minds to e.g. believe that black lives matter; we will define and practice and live a vision for a world where black lives matter.
