A zine for abolition
by Sabrina zhu
All images taken from respective Twitter accounts
What does it mean to build
Collective power is the fruit of mutual aid and community building efforts and is inherently anti-capitalist and anti-imperalist. It comes from an ongoing process of experiencing society’s failure to support us and coming together to demand a better future.
HOW DOES THIS HELP us build a new, just world? “We are put in competition with each other for survival, and we are forced to rely on hostile systems— like health care systems designed around profit, not keeping people healthy, or food and transportation systems that pollute the earth and poison people— for the things we need.”
— Mutual Aid, Dean Spade
When we create a space for collective power we also create community, emotional ties, and a commitment to keep learning. We create networks of people who have the patience to unite against a variety of struggles, making sure the most oppressed— Black, Indigenous, disabled, queer, trans, poor people— are at the forefront. We stake a claim that it is realistic and achievable to create a world that actually meets our needs.
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Weak ties become strong ties, and both weak and strong ties convey information— and connectivity— to and from other social circles. — Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community conducted by Anatoliy Gruzd, Barry Wellman, Yuri Takhteyev
twitter as a tool
First things first— Twitter is ultimately a profit-driven product that mines and sells its users’ data to other corporations in order to keep this capitalist society functioning. However, it is also a powerful tool to build everyday community. For abolitionists, this is an all too familiar struggle. In order to build the world we wish to live in, we make the best of the tools we have available to us.
As became apparent during the 2020 uprising in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, social media can educate the masses like no other. In particular, Twitter’s ability to create threads and retweet them began spreading the power of mutual aid like no other. People could now find education and community on the same platform as the month’s best meme.
Image and content credit to @msvivianrabbit
A requirement of only an email to enter Twitter creates a lot of bots, noise, and bigotry. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed or anxious about all the information.
Misinformation + disinformation As a certain other social media site reminded us during the 2016 election, humans are much more susceptible to fake news than we’d like to believe.
Twitter is not immune from the influx of deliberately deceptive news, known as disinformation, that plagues the rest of the internet.
Take a pause before sharing anything, especially if you feel an emotional response. Read the full article. Fact-check. Cross-reference with sources from different spots on the political spectrum (Di Zhang, Seattle Public Library). Learning and Relearning and When misinformation does get the best of us, what’s important is how we bounce back. Abolition is all about the process— relearning the world through a systemic lens and breaking down our old ways. If you find yourself in a situation where you believed the “wrong” thing, that just means you’re practicing this process yet again!
Building flexibility into your mindset is vital to being an abolitionist. It ensures that you can be receptive to challenging your old beliefs as you learn about new struggles and perspectives.
Below are some musings and thoughts on common pitfalls of the platform.
Do you hear that echo? Those pesky little algorithms allow completely different realities to exist depending on your location on the political spectrum. If you convince someone that everything is a conspiracy theory, they have no reason to believe any view that varies from their own.
Don’t overwhelm yourself with hate, but supplement your feed with some opposing views. No one source of information will tell you everything, so you’ll likely learn something. Just fact-check it first. Lights, Camera, Performative Activism If this topic feels sticky to you, it’s because it is. 2020 brought a large wave of new activists into the Black Lives Matter and anti-police movement. Hip infographics, posed #ProtestPics, and selfies with captions mentioning Breonna Taylor littered people’s newsfeeds, bringing justified criticism that people weren’t doing enough.
Of course, attending the marches and financial support is important— but it’s not just about the end product. With any event comes planning, coordinating safety, spreading the word, and most importantly coalition building. Mainstream media judges marches by number of participants but abolitionists know the new relationships built are the true measure of success.
Elements of a twitter feed
Educational threads Twitter gives all kinds of experts (including those without institutional credits, who are just as important!) an easy way to deliver complex information.
Long threads of 5, 50, or 100+ tweets are a great source of digestible information on why you should care about the new city council bill, ways to stay warm in the winter, or how to see through common lies the system tells us.
friends of friends of friends of friends Many of your favorite abolitionists are active on Twitter — retweeting, engaging in dialogue, boosting a new project or book — because they understand their ability to build collective power.
To build a feed that will always keep you learning: take an active role rather than a mindless scroll through your feed. Keep an eye out for accounts or tweets that catch your attention. Figure out what they bring to your feed and follow them if they fill a gap. Save some space to absorb new information.
that builds collective power
go hyperlocal When grassroots groups put in the hard work of building relationships with each other, they display a blueprint for a new abolitionist social life.
Find the groups near you and read their mutual aid distribution updates, praises for other groups’ work, and specific requests for community members. If your local groups aren’t doing this, figure out why + jump in to help if you have the capacity!
Camaraderie + Reassurance Being an abolitionist without a community is next to impossible. Abolitionist ideals are completely antithetical to most things we’ve been taught from a young age to believe as fact.
Scrolling through a feed full of people who believe a radical transformation of our world is possible can feel like a warm blanket hug. It can fuel us to keep building our numbers and continue our fight.
NOW WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS COMMUNITY? The most beautiful thing about this entire process is the fact that the answer to this question is all up to you! You can: • stay up to date with local mutual aid groups, fulfill the highlighted financial support requests, + even join one! (Highly recommended!)
• learn about international struggles for abolition from local sources instead of US media
• better understand the nuances of various issues from grassroots organizations and voices you might not otherwise get to hear from
• join book clubs and other communities dedicated to continuous learning
• spread and share calls for direct financial support
Why is collective power and mutual aid even necessary? Can’t we just work to FIX our current system? Bills and laws, calling your representatives, and showing up to city council meetings are super important! Use the power you have to make your voice heard, especially on a local level!
But through mutual aid, we understand that our system thrives off of failing to meet people’s needs. Capitalism is only able to survive so long as the system keeps people so desperate they are willing to be exploited. Crisis situations are not a one-time failure of the system but instead, proof that the systems are working.
So if you have the means to meet them now and the opportunity to build community while doing so... why not?
What about non-profits? aren’t they working to help people meet their needs? Non-profits are a band-aid for a system that needs to be fully replaced. They allow people to feel complacent with their rare donation and content that someone out there is trying to help, so they don’t need to. They move the focus to “look at all these nice people trying to help” when it should be on “why are there so many people with unmet needs on the first place?” Non-profits also provide a tax shelter for corporations under the guise of “philanthropy”.
Non-profits are forced to fight for funding, which means they must focus on creating marketing material and getting media attention rather than listening to and meeting the needs of the people they serve.
Non-profits are also single-issue organizations, which can fuel stereotypes or promote hierarchies of worthiness within groups of marginalized people. For example, focusing only on the assimilated, “hard-working” immigrants with families instead of meeting the needs of all immigrants, regardless of background or criminal record.
Having only one cause to fight for also means that you must constantly be proving your services are necessary. If the issue is fully solved and everyone’s needs are met, your entire organization is now out of a job.
THANKS FOR READING!