Introduction

In her book, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, Mariame Kaba teaches us that Prison Industrial Complex] (PIC) abolition "is a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more things that are foundational to our personal and community safety. ” (Kaba 31) The end of prisons and police is only one tenet of abolition. The hope is that in this society where we are better at meeting one another's needs it becomes possible to address harm without reliance on systems rooted in violence and white supremacy.

The project of PIC abolition seems like a daunting task. For one, the number of abolitionists are relatively small and most people aren't informed on what alternatives exist. I've told family members that I think we should get rid of prisons and police and they looked at me like I’ m crazy. These reactions show how successful neoliberal propaganda is at convincing people that we would not be safe without prisons and police.

Even though conversations on abolition began to enter the mainstream from last summer, it still

has a ways to go before becoming a dominant viewpoint. Getting people on board with abolition will take a lot political education to convince people, and even then folks remain hesitant because abolitionists are trying to create a world that has never existed before. People have a lot of fears about what would happen if there were no prisons or police and little knowledge about alternatives or how we go about addressing the root conditions of harm. The US empire has the upper hand in shaping people's perceptions about safety, so it’ s difficult to make the case that prisons and police create more violence than they do safety.

The ways that we (dis)engage with electoral politics, the criminal legal system, and the nonprofit system while organizing outside of these avenues is inextricably linked to the world we end up creating. As Dean Spade articulates in Normal Life “We must endeavor to create and practice a critical trans politics that contributes to building a political context for massive redistribution. A critical trans politics imagines and demands an end to prisons, homelessness, landlords, bosses, immigration enforcement, poverty, and wealth. It imagines a world in which people have what they need and govern themselves in ways that value collectivity, interdependence, and difference. ”

We rarely talk about the inherent limitations of 4

government sponsored institutions in their ability to support social movements and alter material conditions because of their subservience to the state. The relationship between the state, foundations, and organizations is a part of a system I will focus on later in this zine, sometimes referred to as the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC). I do not argue that any efforts within the NPIC or other state-sponsored institutions are futile, but simply that this institution cannot be our only recourse.

So where do we begin with educating people on PIC abolition and building this world of abolition? My answer would be that this project has already started in small and large movements around the world, in the form of mutual aid and combined with other kinds of collective action. Dean Spade defines mutual aid as “ collective coordination to meet each other ’ s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them ” (Spade 13).

I see mutual aid as abolition in action. As we meet each other's needs we come to realize that we keep each other safe in ways that the state, prisons and police never have if you are not are not a rich cis-het white man. It also reveals that another world is possible because we are mobilizing people to create change right now. Mutual aid can be combined with other tactics such as direct action and political education, allowing us to make real strides towards an abolitionist future. 5

My aspirations with this zine are threefold: To examine potential modes of organizing, to document some of the work that me and other Vassar student organizers have done surrounding mutual aid, abolition, and wealth redistribution, and overall, to provide guidance to youth organizers.

The first half of the zine focuses on why we should be engaging more in mutual aid if we want to achieve an abolitionist world. The second half centers my own experiences organizing and provides a guide for the work of wealth redistributions as well as other different organizing tactics.

PART ONE: What World Do We Want to build?