Rev Left Radio - W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

In this fouth installment of our ongoing W.E.B. Du Bois series, Breht and PM sit down with Saudia Durrant and Geo Maher from the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction. Together, they discuss Du Bois, their organization, abolition, the struggle for socialism and communism, the failure of reconstruction, the Palestinian liberation struggle, Cop City in Atlanta, and much more. Follow PM on Twitter or Insta Follow Rev Left on Insta ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left Radio and get access to multiple bonus episodes a month

Hello everybody, welcome back to Rev Left Radio. I am your host and your comrade Bred O'Shea. And today we have on a wonderful episode. It's our fourth installment of our ongoing W.E.B. De Bois series. And today, me and my co-host for the series, P.M. Irvin, have on G. O'Amar and Sadia Durant from the W.E.B. DeBois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction. And we have a really fascinating, wide-ranging discussion on what abolition is, how it is inexorably tied to the struggles for socialism and communism, some of the debates and criticisms within the world of abolition, what this organization is doing, the political education work that is doing in Philadelphia, et cetera. PM, of course, is seated over in California. I'm in the frigid Midwest here in Omaha, and our guests are sitting in Philly. So it's a nice little coast-to-coast-style episode.

And we touch on just a lot of fascinating and important stuff. We touch on what's going on with Palestine. We touch on Cop City and so much more. These are two wonderful guests and a really important organization that they've started. And we just want to get the word out, learn along with them. They're full of wisdom, full of knowledge. And of course, encourage people if they live in the Philadelphia area to reach out and see how they can possibly support the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School or even join it, you know, collaborate with it, whatever.

These are sort of movements that are appearing around the country and people in those areas. If you got something there, definitely go see what you can do to help uplift and contribute to such a good cause. All right. I also mentioned, it's funny, before I go, I also mentioned that G. Omar was on Rev. Left Radio back in 2017, our first year of ever being on the air. He came on for the episode, Venezuela in crisis defending the Bolivarian Revolution. So that's just kind of, it's wild to think that seven years has passed since Reve Left has started, has seven years has passed since I've talked to Geo, et cetera. But we're rectifying that today. And as I said in the episode, hopefully we don't wait another seven years because he really is a fountain of wisdom, as is Saudi.

So without further ado, here is me and PM's interview with Geo and Saudi from the W.E.B. DeBo Movement School for abolition and reconstruct. instruction. Enjoy. My name is G. O. Mar. I am the coordinator of the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. My name is Sadia Durant. I'm a community organizer. Philly and I'm also one of the co-coordinators and facilitators for the abolition school in Philly. Well, wonderful. It's a pleasure and an honor to have both of you on today. I'm also joined by

my co-host for this Du Bois series, PM. PM, would you like to introduce yourself for people who might not have heard our other episodes? Yeah, hi everyone. My name is P.M. Irvin. I'm a philosophy PhD student at Stanford and I work on the radicalism of W.B. Du Boile is racial capitalism and empire to do some organizing work here and there as well. Wonderful. Well, I'm very excited to have everybody here today. This is going to be, I believe, the fourth installment of our ongoing W.E.B. De Bois series in which we have on various scholars, activists, etc., who are influenced by DeBoise in

various ways to talk about his life, his work, his ongoing legacy and relevance to our struggles today. And so today we have on, of course, Geo and Saudi from W.E.B. DeBois Movement School for abolition and reconstruction. So my first question is, can you kind of tell us a little bit about the De Bois Movement School for those who are not familiar with the abolition school? When was it started? And what kind of work does this organization do? So the Du Bois Movement School was, you know, really launched just last year in 2023. It came out of conversations with a lot of movements across the city of Philadelphia about needs for political education. And we launched with a weekend

intensive in August and then a full fall semester of political education running through, you know, the fall of 2023 that brought together 60 or 70 aspiring organizers, young and old from across Philadelphia, primarily in West Philadelphia, to engage in sustained political study. And we operate our study according to four broad principles. The first is abolition. We are abolitionists. And we understand. that abolition is always also a reconstruction. That's the kind of sort of proviso that we insist on adding, meaning that, you know, as many, you know, emphasize, we can't abolish carceral institutions or repressive institutions if we're not also building the new kind of society,

the new structures and alternatives that we want to see in, you know, in the world. Second, we say that we do participatory education, meaning that we begin with people, you know, where they're at. and we understand people's experiences of the world and all of those oppressive structures that constitute and structure their world as providing the building blocks for not only education but for knowledge, right? Like we understand things on the basis of what it is that people bring into the room, and our goal is to sort of generalize people's own experiences into a form of understanding the world that then becomes even more broadly generalized in our third principle,

which is internationalists. We do internationalist study and we practice internationalism. This is unfortunately a kind of necessary criteria. And when we live in a world in which, you know, too often, particularly in intellectual spheres, there are these attempts to sort of divide up, you know, communities, you know, divide them apart from each other. We know from sort of Afro-pessimism and other tendencies that there are these sort of attempts to suggest that our struggles are not able to be joined together jointly. And we, we still study, and we approach this question by studying, you know, the way in which our world emerged, right, and the fact that colonialism and slavery are sort of, you know, co-constititive of capitalism

and of each other, right? So slavery is born of colonialism and the structure that we confront today in the capital, you know, capitalist colonial white supremacist world, all, you know, emerge from the same process of Genesis. So what we study is that. And we practice internationalism in the sense that we do this study together. We bring together movements from across the city, you know, movements struggling against displacement, whether it's sort of black residents of West Philadelphia and the UC townhomes who have been displaced multiple times or Chinatown residents who are currently struggling against displacement for a new 76ers arena or, you know, migrant, you know, populations in South Philly. We understand our space as one that practices internationalism by bringing people together in that participatory way to study and to build their knowledge in conjunction with each. other. And finally, we understand our work to be intersectional, right? And this is a word that's often used and abused, but by that we mean the fact that there are multiple overlapping and mutually

like intertwined parameters of oppression that we confront. These are not separable, you know, race, gender and class are not separate parameters that we simply add upon one another, though. again, they emerge from this historic process of genesis, and understanding that emergence also helps us understand the way in which they fits together today and also the kind of world and community of sort of care that we hope to build in the future, right? The world, you know, as I often call it, a world without police, a world without prisons, a world without, you know, these carceral structures is a world of, you know, of care. It's a world in which people live in equality that is not sort of structured according to white supremacist fear or

economic exploitation or patriarchal violence. But it's a world in which, you know, we're building these alternatives through this broad process of reconstruction. Can I add something small to that? Of course. Everything plus plus plus to everything Gio said. And I think I think the only other piece I wanted to add it is that I think Philadelphia in particular has been exploring what does abolition mean for many years, right? But I think there was a very particular, spontaneous eruption of folks having a desire for political education after 2020. Not saying that that's, you know, magically when folks were doing political ed. We know folks have been doing political Ed, either in movement spaces and organization like grassroots organizational spaces and community

spaces. But I think in 2020, in particular, a lot of grassroots organizations who mobilize people by the thousands and the tens of thousands to come out during the massive George Floyd, right, George Floyd gets murdered, Amad Aubrey, Brianna Taylor. And we see this large national and international disruption of business as usual during the pandemic, right? When folks weren't able to work, we're thinking about what does collective care look like, you know, in the middle of a global pandemic, folks weren't working, right? Folks weren't physically able to go to work, except for folks on the front line in hospitals and in stores. But I think a lot of people who were forced to be isolated indoors, spent a lot of time deeply analyzing this question of

why do we have police and prisons if we've been asking this question of what does it mean to have a safe community, police and prisons, to some people, right, are the solution for that. I think 2020 opened up a large question for people who are wrestling with this and we're wrestling with how do we balance mobilizing rapid response organizing direct action marches protests right that was a huge eruption year in 2020 and i think after a lot of organizations were fighting with everything that they had to win you know defunding campaigns or divestment from policing campaigns or abolishing policing campaigns i think a lot of people in 2020 also recognize that there were a lot of deep questions about what does it mean to abolish,

you know, institutions of state violence and to rebuild something that can respond to intercommunity violence, something that can respond to domestic violence, sexual violence, all the forms of violence that exist. And I think abolition school, right, has been thinking about the need and how to fulfill a need and a curiosity that people have to do, collective in-person political education and study for themselves and also for, you know, the left, right, in Philly and nationally. So I think to the question, right, about what does, what do we do or what do we kind of hope to do in our work? I think providing that space for political ed, for reimagining, for study, for, right, looking back at a lot of the

ideologies, right, getting clarity on them together, to then say, okay, based on what we know now around capitalism, imperialism, state violence, what can we actually rebuild? Yeah, all of that was excellent and so critical. And I really appreciate, I mean, one, all of the work that you're all doing, it's really critical work. And I especially appreciate the attention to internationalism with respect to abolition in particular, and this reminds me a lot about Orsani Burden's tip of the sphere and the sort of abolitionist internationalism that comes out of Attica. So we have another question here. So how does W.B. Du Bois influence the abolition school, not just in terms of the name, but in terms of your political ideology

in work. Yeah. As Saudi, I mean, as Saudi really underlined, we're anchored in Philly. And, you know, of course, the work that we do in the education we offer is relevant far beyond the city. But there are many ways in which Philadelphia shapes our work in particular. And that's in part because this is a city that was shaped by Du Bois and that Du Bois shaped, right? If you look at his work and his research, his sort of innovative research on the sort of structure of, you know, political and social and economic power in the city of Philadelphia, one of his firsts, you know, major works in the Philadelphia Negro and the way that, you know, he's become a lasting figure in the city alongside, of course, many others. And so Du Bois, you know, is central for a lot of the way we think through things. And in particular, I think it's worth emphasizing Black Reconstruction,

right? One of the most important books that I think anyone could read who wants to understand not only U.S. history, but the contemporary arrangement of particularly how race and class operate in conjunction with each other within American capitalism and how that was shaped. We're currently launching advanced study of Black Reconstruction, and it's also, again, important to emphasize that at any given moment in Philadelphia, there's like three or four Black Reconstruction reading groups going on, which is one of the virtues of this city and the way that Du Bois remains relevant to it. But in particular, we take from, You know, from Du Bois, his, you know, and particularly the later Du Bois, the communist Du Bois, who is a revolutionary internationalist, who eventually renounces his citizenship and, you know, and dies abroad.

You know, we take from him this broad imperative to world revolution and the historic understanding of what that looks like in the U.S., right? We take from him the importance of what has come to be known as racial capitalism, as a framework. and which for him is anchored in the ways in which his reading of the Civil War is one that disrupts maybe sort of traditional, you know, Marxist categories, particularly of how history moves and history operates according to certain modes of production, moving in a linear sequence. It puts slavery right at the center of global capitalism, and it understands, you know, on top of that, the dramatic power of at that time enslaved people. taking freedom into their own hands through the General Strike, standing up, walking off of plantations, fighting for liberation and transforming the

meaning of the Civil War and its outgo, right? These are all lessons, I think, that we can draw out of Black Reconstruction and their lessons to have broader implications for how we understand world history and how we understand Marxism, right? Du Bois is transforming what the General Strike mean.

He's transforming what the Black worker and the white worker mean in their distinction and in their relation to one another. He gives us a and understanding of the role of this sort of cross-class whiteness coalition and alliance that has been so fatal to working class unity in U.S. history and globally, and he anchors, all of that in a broader understanding of how the world works, right? Black Reconstruction is also a book about imperialism, right? The defeat of Reconstruction in this moment of possibility and radical multiracial democracy that existed for, you know, a few short years, particularly in South

Carolina, the defeat of that project by white terrorism then makes and turns the U.S. into what he understands to be a reactionary force abroad, right? This is where U.S. imperialism really begins to kick off. This is where the sort of global force of U.S. imperialism finds its origins, and it finds its origins in the Confederate project for a southward facing empire. This is a piece of black reconstruction that people don't always emphasize. So Dubois really shapes a lot of what we do and offers, you know, an anchor, an understanding, and a kind of spirit for the kind of project that we're trying to put forward. Yeah, beautifully said, Sadia, do you have anything to add to that before we move on to the next question? No, not really. I don't have anything major. I think everything Geo said perfectly summarized how Du Bois influences our work and our ideological analysis.

I think the only thing that I would add is that I think Du Bois and even his toning, I think, of how he chronicalizes the history and really unveils, right? He's talked in many books about, you know, veils that have existed, that have separated, you know, most people, especially in traditional educational spaces from understanding history in a very complex way, I think compared to in schools where it's like, you know, we had some. slavery for five minutes. And then, you know, Abraham Lincoln and then some presidents decided that that was no longer a good thing. And then they freed the slaves. Like I think that's right, like the short synopsis of what we usually get in traditional education about what happened in slavery and how do we move forward based on having that assessment. And I think Du Bois and is toning very hilariously being very sarcastic and very critical in naming how abolition and all of its complexity about removing a system, you know, all the sets of systems that exploits

the working class. And also, I think does also a deep dive and looking at like what were some of the complexities in the different political groups who had their own self-interest when they looked at the question of abolition, right? Like the southern planters, the white workers, but then also looking at, you know, folks who, I guess at that time and period would have maybe be would have been considered sort of leftist adjacent, thinking about how to free the white worker, but not wanting to reckon with what does that mean then in terms of competition? If we free enslaved people, that becomes now a black worker, and that represents competition to folks who want to abolish the system. Like, I think our using and our analysis of the boys

is wrestling with the complexities of anti-capitalist, you know, work an anti-capitalist study. It doesn't romanticize nor consolidate or over-collapse. I think the way, the things that we want to assess. And yeah, I think even for me personally, like reading the souls of black folks, you know, from Du Bois was like my introduction in college to, you know, assessing like racism in college, right? So I think, yeah, everything that Geo shared about, you know, Just the way that we want to analyze the ideology that we want to build in this space and the practice of critically thinking about these systems is, yeah, it's present. Yeah. Yeah, very well said.

And, you know, the first two books that I came across in my intellectual journey of Du Bois's was the souls of black folks as well as his work on John Brown, both of which, of course, I highly recommend. But I think both of you highlighted really well how just essential De Bois is, particularly for us here in the belly. of the beast with our sort of unique and uniquely tortured history. And so, you know, American revolutionaries, communist, socialist, we should and we do talk about Mao and we talk about Che Guevar and we talk about Lenin and Marx and Engels. But I think it really is crucial for us to understand the specific history of the material reality that we live in here. And Du Bois, I think, is a sort of indispensable voice and guide for doing precisely that. And that's what makes him so essential for all of us. And that's, of course, one of the reasons why we're doing

this series. But of course, no revolutionary, no intellectual, no human being only has one influence. So who are some other major influences besides for Du Bois, both for you, both for your organization as well for both of you as individuals? Yeah, that's a, that's a really great question. I think there's a really interesting, like the team that we have, facilitators, Malchia and Aunt and Chris Rogers. I think we have an amazing team of folks who brought together a lot of different authors, political prisoners, freedom fighters, to all kind of help shape the materials that we've read. I think starting with thinking about like some of the influencers for the for the Du Bois movement school for abolition. And I know like

France Fanon, right, has been a huge author and someone who we've assessed in thinking about a lot of work that connects to abolition and reconstruction, like this analysis that Du Bois has, is a, you know, project to decolonize the United States, right? And what does that look like? And I think a lot of our materials and our studies have been looking at Fanon's, you know, assessment that decolonizing the nation and national struggle and international struggle, right? By virtue and by definition, colonialism is violent, right? And although obviously there are lots of different authors and writers, including the boys who thought about abolition and reconstruction being a peaceful effort, right? I think there have been authors who we've also assessed, who have also

struggled or maybe pushed back or assessed that analysis differently, right? That if colonizing, people, indigenous people, black people, right, third world people, right, all the different ways that we think of how we exist. If that act of colonialism is violent, right, according to Fanon, that by definition, that struggle against it would be a violent process, right, to remove captors, right? And I think that he's been a huge influencer and thinking about how do we wrestle with what that looks like. How do we, I think, make violence, right, which is often a very oversimplified term.

I think in our mainstream society, like violence could mean intercommunity violence. It could also mean state violence. It can also mean self-defense. And I think exploring how folks are trying to decolonize their systems and capitalism in of itself has been, right, like a part of an assessment that we've had looking at for non-study and his readings also, right? Walter Rodney has been a huge piece in looking at, you know, how Europe, right?

Obviously, the piece around how Europe underdeveloped Africa, right? Thinking about a lot of times the way that black and brown folks are through traditional education, right? We're socialized to think that anything that the oppressor does, right, is amazing as education. Right. We're not socialized to understand that we're really just being indoctrinated into a society that is wider, that is richer, that educates, you know, students on how to prepare to go into the working class and to permanently be the working class versus folks who go to maybe more resource schools, right, where they can become more closer to the oppressor. And I think having Walter Rodney as an influencer has been amazing for the study. We've also talked about hedgelony, right? Anthony Gramskey, looking at how our society indoctrinates us and forces our consent into systems that we don't even realize, right? Things that get passed down to our family, right? Things that get passed down in schools, in churches, whatever the institutions that we're walking through, right, we're constantly being bombarded with cultural things and societal things that force our consent,

or manufacture our consent into white supremacy. So being able to challenge it and think about what's the counterculture that we want to build that believes abolition and reconstruction is possible. I think for me, some of my individual influencers have been, you know, Matulu Shakur, right, Asada, Malcolm X, right, Lamia, Abu Jamal, obviously in Philly,

like folks who came from, you know, their neighborhoods, their communities, their communities, folks who would be considered organic intellectuals who started off being indoctrinated into white supremacist's culture and through movement spaces and political ed spaces were transformed to be the figures that we see and recognize today. And there's a whole lot of others, but I'll kind of just pause there and pass it to Gio. And really quick before Gio gives his answer as well, I just wanted to remind listeners that, you know, many of the people, people that Saudi just recommended from Fanon to Walter Rodney to Gramsci to the Shakurs, including Asada and Tupac. We have episodes on all of those. So if you want to follow any of those, learn more about any of those figures and contextualize them in their times and understand their struggles, you could just search that in the search bar of our show and find more resources on that. But, Gio, do you want to add anything to that question?

Yeah, no, and thank you for jumping in, Brett. Just also to remind us that this is an educational space, right? That you all have been doing incredible work when it comes. to political education when it comes to making education available, right? I mean, I'm someone who's read a lot of books, but also like I don't have that much time to read. And so when I'm in the car, when I'm traveling, you know, this is part of how I study. And, you know, and stay plugged into study as well. And I know that's true for many other people. Thank you. Yeah. Saudi really, you know, laid out a lot of it. And, you know, I could add a few more and to say, you know, we do study Marxism, right? We start from some very basic Marxist categories. So we read some Marx, you know, we read some Luxembourg. We end up, you know,

reading some Lenin and Gramsci. But we also, you know, definitely infuse that with a, you know, what we can understand to be like a third world Marxist orientation, meaning that we do what Du Bois did again, like, you know, raise the question of what happens when you apply these Marxist categories to context for which they were not designed, right? You know, when we, and we look at categories like primitive accumulation and think about the ways in which primitive accumulation is actually an ongoing process. And that it looks different and gains greater depth. When we think about it from the perspective of columnized spaces, right, then what kind of dispossession, proletarianization, or non-proletarianization is involved in the colonial,

in the colonial process. So, yeah, when we're thinking about this sort of third world Marxist trajectory, we're thinking about, you know, Du Bois, too. We're talking about Walter Rodney. talking about Cabral, who's also a really incredible contributor to this tradition. We're talking about Jose Carlos Mariatagi, a Peruvian communist, who helped to sort of rethink this political trajectory for Latin America. And we think about third world revolutions, right? We think about what these revolutions as concrete processes kind of contributed to, you know, to our understanding of, you know, history, colonialism, capitalism, capitalism. And of course, we study more contemporary movements. We study the Compay River Collective. We study the Black Panther Party. We

study, you know, many of the organizations and influences that continue to persist. And again, as Saudi said, right, a lot of this happens in Philadelphia, right, where, you know, is the home of, you know, the move organization, the home of, you know, Mumbai Abu Jamal. And many of the struggles that we came up in in the city were, you know, are, you know, connected to these struggles, you know, the, you know, political prisoners like the late Russell Moon show to many others, who people continue and, you know, currently are struggling, you know, around. And just to add in, you know, real quick while I, you know, I'm on that that subject that when, you know, one of our own educators and facilitators is now a political prisoner. He's been sentenced to federal prison, Aunt Smith. Please check out his, you know, his case and his campaign. And this is part of the repressive wave of sort of counterinsurgency that confronted, you know, the 2020 rebellions from the Trump Department of Justice, but which has been upheld and continued by, by Biden, right? You know, and so we. struggle to free all political

prisoners and we understand that, you know, prisoners in general should be understood as political because we are abolitionists. Really, yeah. And thank you both for sort of mentioning sort of a couple of quick comments I want to make. So the attention

to culture I really appreciate and the mention of Cabral taken together reminded me of this quote from this piece that he wrote in return to the source called National Liberation and Culture where he says, When Gerbil was the brain behind Nazi propaganda, heard culture being discussed, he brought out his revolver. That shows that the Nazis who were and are the most tragic expression of imperialism

and of the deserts for domination, even if they were all degenerates like Hitler, had a clear idea of the value of culture as a factor of resistance to foreign domination. So I think taken with, you know, the work that you're all doing to build a radical political education apparatus and sort of transform our culture is really, really critical. But on to our next question. So what are your thoughts on Du Bois with respect to the black freedom struggle and why in your view is he such an essential figure? You know, I do want to touch on this question of culture just real quickly because you brought it up. And it's crucial for us, right? Because we talk about hegemony, as Saudi mentioned. Because part of that is the question, why are we studying, right? You know,

if ideas don't matter, then we wouldn't study, right? But they do matter, right? And the institutionalization of alternative ideas. And you see this all the way back from, you know, again, from primitive accumulation, from the emergence of capitalism as a system where capitalism had to violently stamp out the memory of other forms of life, right? That's knowledge. That's culture, right? The fact that people used to live on the land, used to have access to the means of production, right? Used to produce for themselves and sustain themselves. And that was not a memory that was given up easily, right? It was not an automatic process whereby people joined capitalism and chose to work for a wage. No one wanted to do that. They fought it. That's where policing emerges,

right, in Great Britain, right, through this process of having to force people into factories by criminalizing vagrancy, criminalizing poverty and criminalizing unemployment to the degree in which they're forcing people to do this kind of labor, right? And I say it and I maybe belabor the point a little bit because the point is very much about cultural memory, historical memory, which is something that we try to do as well at the Du Bois School and in Philadelphia is to uphold that because those memories are memories of other ways of existence, right? The memory of struggle is, you know, something that keeps current struggles alive. The memory that we can get together and, for example, sustain one another is an ongoing

persistent cultural memory that capitalism has to continuously stamp out in this process of primitive accumulation, which seeks to destroy collective forms, right? collective forms are a barrier to capital accumulation, and those forms carry with them, and this is crucial, right? It goes from capitalism, it goes to, you know, to colonization. And we're talking about the stamping out of indigenous collective forms and forms of life. These are alternatives, right? And they're living alternatives, for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. Saadio, do you have anything to add to that one? I always say I don't have anything to add, and then I end up adding stuff. So I guess I'll just say everything plus one to what Gio said. I think what Du Bois, right, when we're reading his pieces in Black Reconstruction in the school and thinking about taking back the narrative, right, in terms of Black freedom struggle, I think it's interesting still even today, like the debates I get into randomly in coffee shops or at the gym or wherever I randomly engage people around some of the pushback around an abolition or even DeBois.

right, it's always this narrative that black people were, you know, polite and peaceful and docile and they were able to work, you know, very, they were able to work with white people at that time, right, during their freedom struggles, right, with amicable white people, right, who celebrated and welcomed their freedom, right? These are some of the, I think, the the constant debates and struggles that I go through sometimes in, you know, day-to-day environments where I think the assessment that we've always analyzed with Du Bois and when he offers a black reconstruction. And what unfortunately, we don't see, you know, books like black reconstruction often mandated in traditional schools and traditional education, right? We see the

opposite, right? We see books being banned that tell the truth and shed the light. that it was black people, right, who, you know, like when we read in the chapter on the general strike, right, when we did a session and looking at how black people, right, strategically, thought intentionally about stepping out of the civil war that took place, which had so much to do with forcing the hand and the result of the civil war, right? When we think about Harriet Tuglin, right, even thinking about why. the Combahee River Collective is named, right? When we look at Harriet Tubman and folks who intentionally said,

I am fighting and running for freedom, I'm going to stop here to bring folks with me. If folks aren't ready to come with me, that's okay. I'm going to take these people to freedom and then I'll come back for them. I think being able to have access to studies like that, I think one, help, at least for me and what I see as a facilitator, right? And I'm sure this is true for a lot of my comrades on the team, right? Being able to have access to spaces where, you know, black, brown, and white folks who align

around these pieces, who align around anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, like, I think being able to look at what De Bois analyzed and offered to us is so critical, right? It's so critical for the movement. It's so critical for unveiling and challenging and shifting the narrative. that are still struggles today around how black people actively worked and actively coordinated and actively strategized, right, for their freedom. Yes, in solidarity and alignment as accomplices with white abolitionists and comrades is so important. Right. And I think being able to have access to those sorts of spaces, I know it's been transformative for me and I'm sure for others in the class.

Yeah. Well said. And of course, yeah, multiracial solidarity. is a beautiful thing and is utterly necessary if we're going to make the changes that we want to see in this country. But you've made this point many times Saudi already in this conversation, which is this sort of fairy tale version of how slavery was ended that puts a lot of agency in an Abraham Lincoln and a lot of agency in the white people who fought the war, but often leaves out completely the centuries of resistance from Africans to their conditions and how that resistance was fundamental to the toppling of the institution ultimately. So that's something, you know, as somebody as myself who's trying to become a high

school teacher actively right now, that's one of those things that I look forward to trying to convey to my students in the future to break through these sort of kindergarten fairy tale versions of American history and actually advance the actual history that occurred. So important points. But I want to bounce this one right back to you, Asadi. I believe this is one of the questions that you said you wanted to spearhead. We've certainly talked about abolition and in the opening question, both of you sort of gestured towards basic definitions, but I'd like to go a little deeper on that. So how do you conceptualize abolition? Like you can maybe talk a little bit more about like what it actually is. And importantly, how is that struggle tied to the struggle for socialism

and ultimately communism? That's a great question. So many thoughts, which one, to listen to. I think in terms of how I conceptualized abolition, I didn't even understand or learn abolition as a term until, I want to say 2018, 2017 maybe the earliest. I think when I intentionally understood it, I did a lot of youth organizing work in Philly, where I work with young people in Philly high schools who talked a lot about, like we would have regular after school programs once a week and we would just make a space for what young people were navigating as school-based problems and issues. A lot of those things obviously came down to like regular sort of teen, you know, community issues. But then there are, there was also a lot of

greater things about like, you know, how black and brown students are very, very used to normalizing having schools that don't have clean or functioning water fountains have books, you know, in 2017 that probably were last sent to them in like 1995 or 2000 have buildings that are literally falling apart or have bars on them, right? Having these schools that don't feel like what, you know, the average child would hope to spend eight hours a day in, having schools that are falling apart, but having metal detectors and police and surveillance cameras and facial recognition cameras and like all these things that criminalize young people or indoctrinate young people to being monitored before being educated and that was sort of my

first understanding of abolition um i've been working with a national org a j around like looking at what does it mean to what does abolition mean yes in like an abstract you know sort of way an abstract or broad way in terms of like having school or environments that feel loving and nurturing and material conditions are supported, but also materially and tangibly do not have police, right? Do not have all the things that, like, our heroes, you know, from the Black Panther Party to the young lords to like the, all the movements, right, have constantly been talking about we have more police than we have, you know, you know, food or homeless shelters or breakfast

programs. And that was sort of my first time at understanding that abolition, right, is abolishing things that do not work for the masses of people. We fundamentally come to this question every few days that a person is murdered by a police officer, right, or in a prison cell by a correctional officer. We're constantly looking at what does it mean to abolish, dismantle, you know, remove, whatever the definition is. But how? do we remove things that the masses of people recognize does not serve, support, nurture, or take care of them? And what does it mean to also, right, thinking about the amazing work in Chicago, right? Thinking about Fred Hampton and his legacy with the Black Panther Party in Chicago,

looking at organizations in Chicago that are fighting to remove policing their schools and to ask that that's you know to ask a radical question of keeping schools open and to keep them well funded instead of funding the police um and i think the the struggle for abolition is so i can i can just hear the group chats of some of my friends who who made who continue to debate me on this and i love having this debate about how abolition is tied deeply to socialism and communism in my humble opinion um others might debate this and say that like, oh, abolition is like, you know, begging the, the master, the oppressor to give you something. And it's, that's such a fundamental argument that I constantly

challenge that if communism and socialism is about making sure that the masses of working class people have public ownership of institutions and materials, that the masses of people can control their material conditions, that they can own the factories, that they can own, the departments that we're not just electing an individual to represent us, but the masses of people are the ones in control, not the 1%, not the billionaires. Then abolition is deeply tied to it, right? The masses of us are saying in a multitude of ways that we do not believe that billions of dollars should go to a military budget, billions of dollars should go to a police budget, billions of dollars should go to surveillance, technology industries, as people are starving,

as people can't pay rent, as people are being evicted and shot to death, you know, like the woman Angel Davis, right, in Philly, who was, you know, shot in the head and luckily and magically survived by a landlord court appointed officer, right? seeing a society that would rather keep a house empty and to shoot a black woman over keep it letting her stay in a house in a vacant house right so I think I think abolition is deeply tied to socialism and communism and all that any ism that means that masses of people who make who produce all of the materials that this world or that this nation right is able to use them to exploit other black and brown nations, right? Abolition is saying that we want to

control, right, our society and our institutions, and we want to control them by removing police and prisons and all forms of colonial white supremacist projects. Yeah, absolutely. And really quick before Gio goes, if Gio is going to add anything to this, I just wanted to sort of reiterate what Saudi was saying, you know, like from the prison system to policing to hyper technological surveillance systems to the threat of homelessness. If you live in any major city in the United States, you walk past homeless people every day. And there's sort of an implicit threat in that, that if you don't, you know, be an obedient worker, this could happen to you from militarized borders and schools to the U.S.

Empire abroad, all of these negative things that abolition wants, that seeks to abolish are there to maintain the class system that we live under, which is called capitalism, right? And so to try to separate these two things, to think that, you can have that class system of capitalism, of inequality, of exploitation, of domination, of domination abroad, but somehow take away all the things that make that system possible. You know, that's sort of where I come in and say, yeah, the fight for socialism and communism, as Saudi was saying, is inextricably linked to abolition. And so I think that's a really important point for people to keep in mind,

and that's at least my position on the topic. Gio? Yeah, no, no, absolutely, right? So, I mean, there's skepticism toward abolition from both directions, right? On the one hand, you have the mainstream skepticism that abolition is too radical, that it's a sort of fantasy. I mean, my view is that the fantasy is that we can continue the way that we are and things will function when they've never functioned, right? The police have never done what they claim to do. They've never created safety. Prisons don't serve any of the stated goals that they have. Instead, they serve, of course, as you as you all have mentioned, the goals of upholding, you know, white supremacist capital accumulation. So you've got the skeptical, you know, a skepticism from the mainstream, but you also have a skepticism from more radical sectors, which is actually growing, right, which says abolition is a weak form of radical, you know, theory and organizing. It's a watered down approach. And this emerges at a specific moment, right? And it emerges at a moment at which the language of abolition has mainstreamed, right? The same goes for decolonization. Both are kind of happening simultaneously, right? And there is a moment. of watering down happening, right? There are people calling themselves abolitionists that don't agree with the things that we're saying right now, right? There are many people who are engaged in sort of mainstream nonprofit work. They're abolitionists doing academic work that is

trash. They're academics. I mean, they're, they're abolitionists and they're, you know, people so-called, you know, engaging in decolonization, of course, where it is, you know, not remotely what we would understand by the term. So the skepticism is, is warranted in a certain way. And these debates are sharpening. There's a recent article. about abolition being, you know, a sort of insufficient term and frame for what it is that we're trying to do in the world. But what abolition offers, I think, is a couple of things, right? One is a, in a certain way, a kind of local framing, right? Abolition appears as a kind of American language for thinking through some of these revolutionary traditions and struggles, right? And also

a sharp framing that focuses on the institutions of carceral capitalist power, right? And both these pieces are crucial, right? On the one hand, understanding U.S. history, you know, abolition is something that, you know, has a certain amount of power in U.S. history that, you know, capital, I mean, that communism struggles to acquire, it struggles to gain as an overarching kind of framework. It speaks to black freedom struggles in a certain kind of way. And it speaks to them, again, in conjunction with these institutions that exist, as we know, to uphold capitalist accumulation, right? They engage in the violence. You don't have capitalism without police and prisons, right? Because you don't have capitalism without violent primitive accumulation without the containment

of people to plantations or ghettos, without the containment of people to prisons, without the exclusion of people, the displacement of people, all of which are violent forms of state action that are engaged in, you know, through and, you know, operate through the police, right? The police are the defenders of capitalism and its foot soldiers. So what better way to fight capitalism than to fight the foot soldiers of, you know, of capitalist power, right? And so the idea that, you know, this is somehow less radical to do strikes me as very strange and wrongheaded. And especially in a moment where it's a good thing that hundreds of thousands of people consider themselves to be abolitionists, right?

What we need to do, though, and I think this is where I would agree with maybe some of the more radical critics, is to be very aware of and have sharp debates over what abolition means to us, right? And this is part of, I mean, what we're doing today, right? which is to say, how do we understand abolition is something that's infused with socialist and communist content, right, that's infused with revolutionary content and that remains internationalist and not kind of local and parochial. I didn't read Black Reconstruction as an academic, right? I read it as an organizer. I was in an organization called Bring the Ruckus that comes out of this sort of revolutionary, you know, communist party building tradition, but which viewed, you know, white supremacy as a sensual.

piece of upholding capitalist power in the United States. And our view, organizationally, was always that, listen, if we fight white supremacy in the way that it's upheld and reproduced every day on the streets by the police, we open space for revolutionary class unity for, you know, this struggle, right? In U.S. history, in particular race has always been the primary dividing force, separating, you know, class struggles, weakening those class struggles. And we see that today, right? This is part of the class struggle, right? This is part of the struggle for socialism and the struggle for communism. Is this process of overcoming and destroying and weakening those forces that uphold it and reproduce it every day, right? And that's important to say, right? Because

it's not simply the fact that the police are brought in to do the bidding of capitalism, right? It's, you know, this is almost like an epistemological mistake, I think, about how we understand these things. But, you know, when we understand the police to do what they actually do, which is to be active participants in, right, the construction of that power and that, you know, again, upholding, recreating, reproducing white supremacy every day, they play an active role in that. And so our goal is to disrupt, disrupt, destroy that, weaken their, you know, weaken their power. And this is where reconstruction, I mean, reconstruction is communism, right? Reconstruction is the building of society in which police and prisons make no sense. And there's no way to understand that society,

except as a socialist or communist society, right? It's a society of equality. It's a society without white supremacist fear and anxiety. It's a society without patriarchal violence. And we don't have those kinds of societies, right? And you won't have those societies under capitalism. It's not possible, right? And so, you know, there's this idea maybe that we should be saying more clearly what it is that we're talking about.

But the goal is to understand the fact that abolition constitutes a tactical and strategic struggle for the kind of world that we want to build in that world is necessarily socialist. Brilliant. And thank you both for such a sharp and excellent analysis. So you already touched a little bit on Reconstruction, GEO, but I want to, I guess, tell the listeners. So one of the principles, and this was mentioned earlier in the conversation, but one of the principles, the abolition school is that there can be no true abolition without reconstruction. which is a very Du Boisian insight, right, coming from Black Reconstruction. So could you talk a little bit more about what Reconstruction is,

at least sort of in its original historical context and what it might mean for us today? Why did it fall after the Civil War? And specifically, the main question here is, why can there be no true abolition without Reconstruction? Yeah, no, it's a great question. And again, for people who haven't read Black Reconstruction by Du Bois, It's just an essential text. Because it's about the Civil War, but it's also about this period in which there was, for Du Bois, you know, the real possibility of rebuilding society along very different lines.

This was a, you know, a rebuilding of multiracial revolutionary democracy. It was something that he was tempted to call in South Carolina the dictatorship of the black proletariat, although he kind of pulls back from using that terminology in the text. But it's a period that teaches us several things. It teaches us, A, you know, that you can't abolish slavery without rebuilding society or you get exactly what we got, right? Which is new slavery in different forms, right, which is convict leasing, Jim Crow, you know, and systematic, you know, policing and mass incarceration. This is all the product of a failed reconstruction. In other words, slaves were so-called freed, you know, except for the, you know, the exception of imprisonment in the 13th Amendment. But they were freed to a capitalist world in which, you know, the landholding structure didn't

really change in which police were increasingly used to, you know, to enforce limitations on mobility, right, and essentially forcing people to retain employment, often with the very same, you know, people that they had just been freed from the plantations, right? So you can't simply, you know, abolish an institution without changing the foundations of that institution or you get new forms of the same. Think about that today, right? If we could snap our fingers and abolish the police right now, there would be new police tomorrow. They may be private police, they may be whatever, but the reality is our society is built on such structural inequalities that the police are called into being every day even if they don't exist, right?

So we need to rebuild, we need to reconstruct that society and to do so in, you know, in very different ways. Another key insight from the reconstruction era is that black power means freedom for everyone, right? This is what we saw in South Carolina, right? We saw greater equality. We saw greater access to political participation, even for poor white people, right, who had been excluded by property requirements and literacy tests from being able to even vote, right? And yet those same poor white people then helped destroy this project and this great opportunity. And for Du Bois, this is a radically democratic moment, right?

It's the closest the United States ever got through real democracy. And we have not approached that, you know, in any period. since, right? We're actually currently experiencing a period of mass, you know, disenfranchisement, which we can understand very much according to the framework that Du Bois lays out, right? Pushing back on black participation in just the very basic level of, you know, U.S. elections is an explicit strategy for white power, right, and for capitalist power. And that's, you know, that continues to be, you know, to be the case today. Now, again, it's important to say that When we're talking about no abolition without reconstruction, which is something that we say all the time, that's in a way, it's a slogan and it's an answer that begs more questions, right?

Because the question is also of how do you frame these two pieces in conjunction with each other, right? Because part of what that means is that we need to rebuild alternatives as we are attempting to abolish, you know, the existing worlds and carceral structures. And you could take that to me, for example, let's not abolish the police. until we can build up community, right? That's definitely not what we're trying to talk about, right? Because it's very much a question of balancing the two. If we have the opportunity to make strides in abolishing the police as, you know, for example, in Minneapolis amid the rebellions, right, there was a possibility of actually

engaging in a process of dismantling the Minneapolis police. That is an opportunity that we absolutely need to take, right? And what you saw as a very quick response to that was the immediate development of a massive, massive rapid response network to provide safety in central Minneapolis, right, in the absence of the police, right? So in other words, the rebuilding and the reconstruction can happen very quickly when we have these opportunities to dismantle, right? Although we're trying to say is that the two need to work together. We do not believe that we can simply go build these small alternatives in our little, you know, in our little niches and in our little community centers and our little anarchist

bookstores and expect that those will replace the society that exists because we need to also you know, have our sort of, you know, targets on destroying and dismantling existing structures. It's a question of balancing the two. Yeah, absolutely. Let's go ahead and move on here. I want to be respectful of your time. We have a couple more questions here. But as we speak, the U.S.-backed Israeli regime is conducting a genocidal mass murder and dislocation campaign.

I truly believe it is a second Nakva in Palestine. How is the struggle for abolition, reconstruction, and liberation here in America tied to struggles for justice and equality and liberation around the globe and why is anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism essential aspects of this broader struggle?

Yeah. So part of what we need to do when it comes to, you know, making sure that we're sharp about how we understand abolition is, as we said before, it has to be internationalists, has to be anchored in long-standing,

you know, anti-imperialist struggles. It has to foreground revolutionary movements in the so-called third world, right, struggling, whether it's from Venezuela, you know, to Palestine for revolutionary alternatives, you know, and it has to understand the fact that these communities need to be able to struggle and win and defend themselves if we're going to talk about any kind of true abolition. And so if we say abolition is communism, right, abolition is also, you know, anti-imperialism, right? And we can look at that in different ways. We can look at the fact that U.S. intervention in, you know, across the world is a form of

policing, and here the complicities have been permanent, right? Stuart Schrader has a great book Badges Without Borders, which talks about the fact that it's not only the fact that the U.S. Polices the globe, right? The Vietnam War was a so-called police action, right? The U.S. has not declared war on the Houthis right now, but is policing the red, you know, like the, you know, the entire region, right, against disruptions of capital. We, you know, it's also the fact that, you know, counterinsurgency takes place at home, right? Again, it takes place against our movements against our comrades like Aunt Smith, who are themselves subject to explicit counterinsurgency strategies that have developed in conjunction with each other over the years. Of course, we know

that Israel is a crucial hub for counterinsurgency. It is quite self-consciously placed itself at the heart of the counterinsurgency industry, which is highly technological, but also tactical and strategic, that Philadelphia police are going and are trained in Israel, right? And so as we emphasize the students, right, the same thing that's happening in Palestine is happening here, right? And it's the same people doing it. It's the same, you know, sort of organizations and the strategists and the police, you know, the structure of, you know, of police power. And we can flip that around and we can look at the fact that, you know, October 7th was a jailbreak, right? It was quite literally an abolition, a mass abolitionist rebellion against the brutal containment of the residence of Gaza, right?

who were literally penned up in an open-air prison, who were literally left, you know, and had all of their boundaries policed and the caloric intake of their residents controlled by the Israeli state. There's no way to describe this except for, you know, as, you know, as a prison. At the same time, as a prison in which, you know, resistance was able to develop. And certain alternatives were able to develop and we're seeing those alternatives flourish today in this incredibly difficult but also necessary struggle against settler colonialism.

This is where we see, of course, settler colonialism and policing going hand in hand. It's always been the case. Police in the U.S. came out of, you know, colonial endeavors in Haiti, in Nicaragua, in the Philippines, right? They learned through colonial warfare, you know, how to develop policing strategies for the U.S. And the same goes for the original so-called professional police in the U.K. We're policing the Irish, you know, colonial landscape, right? So we see the ways in which these are connected together. And I think the Du Bois School and our seminars, our weekly seminars, provided a crucial space for, you know, not only healing and sort of dealing with the brutal trauma of the ongoing genocide, but also deep, you know, theorization of the history of Palestinian, you know, struggle, Israeli settler colonialism and strategizing, right?

We had students and others who were directly engaged in, you know, some of the most important direct actions that were happening. Philadelphia and D.C. and elsewhere. And we were every week talking about how best can we contribute to this ongoing liberation struggle because Palestinians freeing themselves is also the way in which Palestinians are doing the world of service and helping us sort of like free our own minds and our own sort of struggles moving forward. The only thing I would quickly add everything plus plus plus with Gio said, I would just add that I'm very appreciative of during the class, one, having so many students who were participating with, like, the Philly Palestine coalition, that we had so many students who were actively involved in actively organizing

the demonstrations in Philly for solidarity with Palestine. We also pivoted, right, like tailored. And I think this is also like the responsibility of a political ed group, right? thinking of like pedagogy of the oppressed and like power frerry and like their responsibility of a political ed any educational institution right is not to be neutral right no education is neutral it either helps people to conform or helps people to think of freedom was what he framed like we tailored so much of our space around political ed like some of the the pieces that we wanted to study for what was happening live and in real time with the occupation and the violence that Palestine experience we had, Anne Smith, right, one of our co-facilitators leading

a lot of the conversations that we were having about how what we see that has historically happened to black and brown people in the U.S. as being synonymous to what we see happening to Palestinians in real time right now. Like I've seen so many videos, right, archive videos coming back of Malcolm X, right, decades ago, because we know this, this, this genocide did not start just in 2023. It's, right, been decades and decades of oppression and

displacing with people in violence, right? Malcolm X talking about just the battle that we see over human rights, right? And how there's so many similarities between what black and brown and working class people are experiencing in the U.S. and why it's so critical for there to be

intentional and radical and grounded participation in supporting Palestinians and challenging. I think that's one of the things that is felt, I don't, yeah, I guess I would say exciting, exciting only in the context of fighting off the, the depression of what's happening, right, overseas. But, like, seeing people sharply being prepared

to challenge this mainstream Zionist narrative, right? I think it's been something that's been, really important for us as a group, right, to think about that what we're studying is not a dead thing. What we're studying about like Du Bois or Marxism, right? It's not something that's just in the past. It's something that's actively playing out presently. And there's nothing in the past that isn't presently and actively also playing out. So yeah, just adding that, I think being able to look at how a lot of the black, pan-African, internationalists, you know, leaders and figures have also been constantly talking about, like, the oppressive, suffocating grip of occupation

and the denial of human dignity to folks in different regions is something that we have to actively have as a part of our committed study. Yeah, thank you both for your insights. I really appreciate this conversation on Palestine and particularly linking the U.S. carceral states with the ongoing occupation and genocide against Palestinians. I do want to plug really quick. There is a new book coming out that was edited by the Palestinian Youth Movement that was literally smuggled out of prison. It was first confiscated and then smuggled out of an Israeli prison by a Palestinian political prisoner, well, prisoner, but all Palestinian prisoners are political prisoners, right. It's called the Trinity of Fundamentals, and it's coming out with 1804 books, so everyone check that out, pre-order it, supports a great work by the Palestinian youth movement.

But right now, one of the major projects of the American carceral state is Copseid in Atlanta, and I'm sure you both have many opinions about this, but can you talk about what's going on there, the resistance to it, and why it's such an important issue for those who consider themselves as revolutionaries and abolitionists? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, just speaking for myself, the struggle against Cop City has been incredibly inspirational, right? And again, like, we can look at this both from the side of the system and from the side of the resistance and see the ways in which the two mirror each other, right? Because what is Cop City doing, right? It's, you know, seeking to bring precisely this kind of counterinsurgeon warfare to police training. You know, this already exists, right? Police are trained

in counterinsurgency all the time, tactics, you know, strategies. They're trained to see communities as the enemy, right, and as a risk and a danger to themselves and to defend themselves against the community, you know, first and foremost. But we're also, you know, should be aware of the ways in which Cop City is particularly relevant at this moment of, you know, collapsing U.S. agaminy in capitalist crisis, right? Like, you know, it's not an accident that, you know, police tactics are escalating, are becoming more uniformly militarized. You know, we don't believe demilitarizing the police will do anything to fix the problem. But, you know, precisely because the problem is policing, the problem is non-militarization. But at this moment in time,

we're going to see more and more cop cities, you know, and we already do. And we like to say that every city is cop city, right? Every city is, you know, structured according to policing parameters, right? And increasingly our societies are reshaped according to the logic of policing. It's a world of police, a world in which every city is a cop city, right? Again, what happens when you flip that around, you see the ways in which the, and here's what's really inspiring for me is the fact that the movements, um, struggling against Cop City were so skillful in bringing together many different pieces of this

struggle, right? Not only the abolitionist struggle against policing, but the environmental struggle, you know, against the sort of seizing of public, you know, protected lands to be destroyed by this sort of police training center with the anti-colonial and an indigenous struggle over what that territory were meant. And it wasn't just sort of indigenous territory, it's also a territory in which escaped slaves would be hiding, right? You know, this is a you know, the history of this space and this territory, and I think organizers were incredibly effective in galvanizing support, in bringing together struggles that many see as different struggles or even sort of contradictory struggles. And they've been incredibly effective at targeting

supporters of Cop City and making it difficult to do that kind of business, right? So I think we should look to Cob City, not only as a sort of dystopian vision of the policing future, what it definitely is, but also as a sort of guidebook for thinking through resistance as well. Everything, boom, boom, boom, blah, bra, bra, everything that Gio said. And I think the, I think it's definitely alarming seeing the, I think it's alarming and also clarifying, like it's not fully surprising, but it's alarming to see the knee-jerk response. right from like which is what's going to happen right right wing lawmakers who then use thing like use this state in forms of state violence to silence uh organizers folks who are choosing to protect land over choosing to protect police having access of millions of dollars to do target practice

which is really weird and fundamentally creepy to me but seeing the seeing the right right using RICO charges to stop people who are organizing to protect the land, protect clean air, to protect trees, to protect space. And to also know that like how Cointel Pro, like just knowing historically how when movements have used things that we think we have access to like free speech and free organizing and using organizing to protect research. resources, right, crafting things like, you know, racketeer, corrupt organizing laws then to silence people. Seeing like thousands of people in Atlanta organizing to offer public comment about why

they do not support a cop city in their area and then seeing legislators and policymakers rushing to figure out then how to move the goalposts to say, oh, you know, if we, it's, you know, if we, If people think that they're going to, you know, control or influence the city, they have to do it using democratic processes. And then seeing people coming out and doing that thing and then lawmakers trying to then shift the goalpost even further. Like all the, I think it was definitely difficult. And this is something that we assess in abolition school, right, seeing how the contradiction or the struggle of how folks participating actively. in their democracy to voice their opinion is a critical practice in any nation, in any movement. But to see how that alone, right, is not the only strategic thing that you can do, right?

Because once you participate, lawmakers will then say, okay, we said you had to, you know, show up and share public comment. And all of y'all did that. So now we have to think about how to how to delay the timeline for when a vote is going to come down or how folks are going to assess who's allowed to make public comment. Like I think how we looked at what's happening in Cop City, the threats of Cop Cities in Atlanta, like how that's also a model of what other cities should be strategically thinking about.

I think there was legislation in Baltimore where folks were attempting to create a similar model, right? I think what's important for us and what's been important for us in abolition school to think about has been looking at the fights domestically and nationally to actively participate, right? To organizing is constant, right? Organizing, you don't organize to get to win one thing and then you stop, right?

It's a constant practice to see fights like in Cop City as something that we all nationally and internationally should be thinking about to oppose and to challenge, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned Baltimore. Cop City, of course, being built around Atlanta. You can't help but note that these are two historically black cities and the fact that the first cop city and perhaps an attempt to make a second cop city in these two cities is by no means a mere coincidence. But that is going to wrap it up for today. As I said earlier, I want to be respectful of both of your time. Gio and Saudi. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom, your really important work and the depths of your insights with us and our audience. It's deeply, deeply appreciated. I also wanted to say, Gio, I don't even know if you remember this, but we've been on the air since 2017, and you came on in 2017 to this show. I do remember. Yeah. The episode, Venezuela in Crisis, defending the Bolivarian Revolution, if anybody's interested in going into the Wayback Machine and checking that one out. So it's

really cool that seven years later, you're back on the show. Let's not wait another seven years to get you back on it. But before I let both of you go, can you let listeners know where they can find and support the W.E.B. DeBoice Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction and where listeners can find each of you and your work online. Yeah, well, you can find us in West Philadelphia if you're around, but online, abolition school.org and on Twitter and Instagram, we're at abolition school. Please plug in. Please amplify what it is that we're doing. Please, you know, contribute to support our, you know, our ongoing project. Please also pay attention to the free Ant campaign, Aunt Smith again, has been, you know, is now locked up in a federal prison, you know,

for, you know, possibly the next 10 to 12 months. And this is a, you know, a comrade and organizer, one of our, you know, one of our best friends, you know, and an essential part of the community here in Philadelphia, an educator who was targeted for being such an effective organizer and educator in and around the 2020 rebellions. And, you know, so he's someone that needs all of our solidarity and our support. And you can find more info on his case at F-A-N-F-H-L. In Saudi, where can people find you in your work? Yep, everything you can find. Where do I, where am I at on these streets? Instagram. You can find me on Instagram at Sa-D-S-A-U-D-E-A-H at Saadia on Instagram or on the Abolition School website, Twitter, Facebook.

Facebook and all the things. Beautiful. P.M. Yeah, no, thank you both so much for coming on. It was really a pleasure and let's definitely keep in touch. And just want to reiterate, please support Anne Smith, Rev. Left family. I believe that the Du Bois move in school has put out calls for encouraging people to send him letters. So definitely tap in with them. if you have capacity to do that.

And yeah, thank you both so much. You're doing incredible work. We really appreciate it and love the idea of the work that you're doing around the Black Reconstruction Reading Group. Everyone read Black Reconstruction right now. You know, run, don't walk. And yeah, thank you both so much. Absolutely.

And as the final thing, I'll put as many of the links that we mentioned in this episode. I'll put them in the show notes so people can find the organization and other things as quickly as possible. Of course, if you're in the Philadelphia area, definitely consider checking out and finding ways to support what these wonderful comrades are doing. All right. Thank you again so much for coming on. Love and solidarity. I'm exhausted.

Last night I couldn't sleep. But when I did, I could hear bombs in my dreams, nightmare situation. How could they be so evil making mortals out of children and innocent people? We expect the bombs not knowing where next. Huddling the corner of my room trying to protect my little brother. As the building shakes like his possessed, but nothing stronger than the will of the oppressed. I bombed back with my lyrics and rhymes living at times trying to break the Palestinian minds. What's hiding in the clouds hanging over my head?

My dad risks his life outside to buy bread. The fourth war in my 12th year at this stage. I'm numb, though I haven't feel scared. There's nothing I can do in this case to stay safe. I'm brave, even though this house could be in my grave. I want freedom for the population. Two million prisoners living in this location, shouting at the wall, but nothing is ever changing. Death life under an occupation.

I want freedom for the population. Two million prisoners living in this location. Shouting at the wall, but nothing is ever changing. Death life, under an occupation. Mother's mourned, fighting with grief. White sheets covered by his death lie on the streets. Buildings turn to ash, but my mind is made of steel, so it doesn't take much for me. me to heal won't lose the will to live or lose our minds my auntie lost her home so she lost her

life but she is still alive but traumatized by the bombs death flew in and dropped at night my sister couldn't sleep try to stop her cries i said it was fireworks i was telling her lies where's the compassion this is heartless it's like they want us all living in darkness cutting off water and electricity for hours they're knocking towers but that's not knocking the power that i have in my pen when i'm right of them unstoppable. The microphone is the only escape possible, because that's the way that I can speak my mind. I wonder how does the fighter pile asleep at night. No, when he can turn the city upside down, all of a sudden, slaughtering families with the push of a button.

I want freedom for the population. Two million prisoners living in this location, shouting at the wall, but nothing is ever changing. Death's life under an occupation. I want freedom for the population two million prisoners living in this location shouting at the ball but nothing is ever changing that's life under an occupation