Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies

The importance of such critical connections is clear in resistance to Israel’s genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, which is being enacted by the right-wing Likud party with the U.S., European, Australian, and Indian governments’ support. Yes, people are fighting for federal and local ceasefire resolutions, and for legislative and executive action to stop the billions the U.S. has been sending unconditionally to Israel’s military. Those are critical fights. But equally critical are the conversations people are having with family members, friends, and comrades, in their synagogues, churches, and faith communities, that are rooted in relationships and shared values. Small groups are practicing and inviting others into resistance to genocide by becoming affinity groups that participate in larger actions; fasting together; disrupting business as usual; answering calls for general strikes and boycott, divest, and sanctions; mounting and supporting mutual aid and solidarity projects with Palestinians in Gaza and beyond; and finding every way to resist every day. They’re networking their relationships and actions together into massive global resistance in support of a #Free Palestine, a permanent ceasefire, ending the occupation, and halting Western nations’ financing of the right-wing, Zionist, Israeli settler-colonial regime. In these ways, in the face of the failure of governments, courts, and the UN to act effectively to stop ongoing genocide, we are having an impact against seemingly immovable systems of violence—even if it’s far too little and far too slow given the scale and pace of the violence. And as previous movements like the global anti-apartheid movement—which also operated through decentralized, networked actions targeting whatever made the apartheid state possible, whether it was a university, employer, manufacturer, consumer product, business, government—have shown, we can eventually shift systems of power in this way.

By engaging in decentralized, network-based resistance, we grow our relationships, trust, and capacity to care for each other along with our impact. In the process, we build our analysis and collective courage to resist U.S. and global fascism as it grows through the collaboration between right-wing governments hell-bent on imposing authoritarian and genocidal futures on us. We need to show up in our relationships and communities in ways that disrupt the Right’s power, invite people into our vision, and are decentralized and adaptive but shaped by a shared intention and practice of collective liberation. Because as I’ve learned over decades of organizing, and in conversations with organizers that have informed this book, this is the only way we are going to survive.

While most of the book is focused on the prefigurative politics of visionary organizing toward abolitionist horizons, a recurrent thread in your conversations with organizers is about the backlash they’re facing from growing right-wing White supremacist and fascist movements. As organizers grapple with this, what are the challenges of practicing a commitment to abolitionist principles when organizers face threats from the state and White supremacist violence? What lessons can be drawn from movement history and the building of abolitionist futures today to help organizers navigate this violence and respond to it? 

As I spoke with people in the process of writing this book, these questions consistently came up. Yes, they’d say, this all sounds great, but decentralized networks can be disrupted, communities of practice can be crushed, relationships can be poisoned, whole communities can be destroyed and subjected to unspeakable state violence, as we are currently witnessing in Palestine. What do emergent strategies have to offer when it comes to directly contending for power against people who are bent on destroying us and the people we love? I don’t know that we necessarily came up with satisfactory answers. 

In many ways, ideas about emergent strategies and prefigurative organizing have emerged in the context of organized abandonment—whether in Detroit or in the Global South—in places where the state or other significant external forces were largely absent. What happens when our decentralized communities and networks of resistance are perceived as a threat by the state or the Right? While decentralization and adaptation offer some protection in numbers, nimbleness of tactics, and the absence of a singular leader or infrastructure that can be eliminated—as we’ve seen with leaderful movements like the struggle to #StopCopCity—we need to continue to find ways to strengthen, inoculate, and build power to protect our communities and networks against state and right-wing violence and shift the systems of power that enable it. 

Ultimately, we kept coming back to what makes those things possible: the quality of our relationships, our connections, and the strength of our shared values, politics, and practices toward the world we want to see. I was grateful to dive into this with many visionary organizers. As an organizer with roots in resisting authoritarianism in the Philippines, Kalayo Pestaño discussed the importance of affinity groups—smaller groups within mass movements united around shared goals, whose members connect and take care of each other, making courageous and effective resistance possible in the face of violent state repression. Kelly Hayes and Adaku Utah each talked with me about how abortion funds and doulas are forming communities of practice that make continued access to abortion possible amid increasing criminalization. Walidah Imarisha and I talked about how incarcerated people organize to minimize harm and resist state efforts to quash them. 

Recently, at an Interrupting Criminalization event, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, co-executive director of the Highlander Center for Research and Education, spoke of turning to relationships they had built for decades across the South^[2] following a 2019 White supremacist arson attack on their office building. I experienced those relationships firsthand at a group retreat shortly after the attack. Because of our relationship with the Center, we chose to host the retreat there to support it, and as we traveled there from across the country, we relied on relationships they had built to ensure safe passage for Black trans organizers.

Again, it’s not a wholly satisfactory answer, especially in this moment of unspeakable, genocidal violence that is destroying entire infrastructures, families, communities, networks, peoples. But it’s the one we have—and it’s the one we’ve seen make liberation movements possible under similar historic conditions. 

With its expansive thinking about abolition and storytelling rooted in organizing, Practicing New Worlds yields insights that offer infinite possibilities for how we approach complex social change. Some readers will reach the end of the book feeling inspired by its multiple ways forward and openness to “what lies beyond,” while others may still feel overwhelmed by what emergent strategies offer in this world’s conditions of intensifying violence. What would you say to these readers about how and where they can start to practice new ways of being, relating, and organizing?

Practicing New Worlds is an effort to illuminate how emergent strategies help bring abolition into the realm of the actionable. If you can do one thing that manifests the world you want to see, find at least one other person to do it with, and practice it daily, in coordination and connection with others, you are shaping abolitionist futures. If you learn from your mistakes, adapt, iterate, and proliferate through translocal and transnational networks shaped by shared politics and intentions, you can shift power and culture. If we each do this, we can make a collective impact and transform complex systems—like human societies and ecosystems—toward the world we want and need to build. 

We can start small, but we don’t stay small.