Abolishing Carceral Society

• Publisher: Common Notions
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781942173304
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Beyond border walls and prison cells—carceral society is everywhere. In a time of mass incarceration, immigrant detention and deportation, rising forms of racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence, and deep ecological and economic crises, abolitionists everywhere seek to understand and radically dismantle the interlocking institutions of oppression and transform the world in which we find ourselves. These oppressions have many different names and histories and so, to make the impossible possible, abolition articulates a range of languages and experiences between (and within) different systems of oppression in society today.

Abolishing Carceral Society presents the bold voices and inspiring visions of today’s revolutionary abolitionist movements struggling against capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, ecological crisis, prisons, and borders.

In the first of a series of publications, the Abolition Collective renews and boldly extends the tradition of “abolition-democracy” espoused by figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, and Joel Olson. Through study and publishing, the Abolition Collective supports radical scholarly and activist research, recognizing that the most transformative scholarship is happening both in the movements themselves and in the communities with whom they organize.

Abolishing Carceral Society features a range of creative styles and approaches from activists, artists, and scholars to create spaces for collective experimentation with the urgent questions of our time.

Through essays, interviews, visual art, and poetry, each presented in an accessible manner, the work engages with the meaning, practices, and politics of abolitionism in a range of historical and geographical contexts, including: prison and police abolitionism, border abolition, decolonization, slavery abolitionism, antistatism, antiracism, labor organizing, anticapitalism, radical feminism, queer and trans politics, Indigenous people’s politics, sex worker organizing, migrant activism, social ecology, animal rights and liberation, and radical pedagogy.

SOUTH AFRICAN STUDENTS’ QUESTION

REMAKE THE UNIVERSITY, OR RESTRUCTURE SOCIETY?

Alexandre Publia (pseudonym)

FROM SOUTH AFRICA TO INDIA,¹ HONG KONG TO CHILE,² CANADA to the United Kingdom,³ and California to Missouri and beyond,⁴ student protests worldwide are at a crossroads. In October 2015, South African students led the “Fees Must Fall” protests, which culminated in a weeks-long national shutdown that halted approximately 10 percent tuition increases.⁵ These were the largest protests since the 1976 Soweto Student Uprisings.⁶ University students led thousands in a march on the national capitol.⁷ In the Western Cape, students took over flagship universities, such as University of Cape Town (UCT) and Stellenbosch University (SU).⁸ They even attempted to shut down Cape Town International airport.⁹

A WOMAN HOLDS UP A PROTEST SIGN READING “1976?”

DURING SOUTH AFRICA’S 2015 OCTOBER FEES MUST FALL PROTESTS.

MEDIA CREDIT: IMRAAN CHRISTIAN AND RHODES MUST FALL.

Nearly a year later, students continue to protest and demand more than free education.¹⁰ They endure despite widespread suppression of protests, through expulsions and trumped-up charges.¹¹ Assaults and property damage occurred from confrontations with security forces.¹² Many security personnel were private contractors.¹³ South Africa’s university students have asked the critical question that underlies all student-led and education-focused protests, and that Californians and students across the United States must also ask ourselves: How far must we go? Must we focus on the more achievable, shorter-term project of transforming our schools? Or, must we focus on the more ambitious, longer-term project of remaking our societies?

MAP SHOWING CITIES ACROSS SOUTH AFRICA WHERE UNIVERSITIES WERE ENTIRELY SHUT DOWN BY FEES MUST FALL PROTESTS

(MEDIA CREDIT: P. KIM BUI)

The Rhodes Must Fall collective (RMF), which is overwhelmingly led by marginalized, Black university students, has demanded more than institutional “transformation.” Instead, they have consistently demanded total “decolonization”: a radical abolition and reimagination of entire social structures. RMF has refused shallow reforms to fundamentally colonial, Eurocentric, and anti-Black institutions. They have repeatedly called out universities’ corporate lip service and empty promises over twenty years of negligible change.¹⁴ They have highlighted the connections of universities to military-industrial complexes, and attacked the way that universities and Global North firms remain dependent upon the exploitation of Black labor. RMF’s radical demands and their strategy of aiming beyond academia has led the way in raising consciousness about South Africa’s and other postcolonies’ negligible social and economic transformations. By addressing neoliberalization and corporatization of universities in a frame of colonial violence against Black and LGBTQ+ bodies, students have raised larger questions of neoliberal governance by white-owned, global capital.

RMF has consistently alleged that, in the current neocolonial/neoliberal system, wealthy, elected, multiracial elites have simply replaced the former, unelected, all-white, apartheid-era elites. Both pre- and post-apartheid governments are beholden to white-owned, global capital. Because of, and not in spite of, such radical, ambitious claims, RMF inspired South African students to demand more, protest longer, include more stakeholders, and ultimately achieve more of their goals. In doing so, they have highlighted the global predicament of neoliberalism and so-called postcolonialism, and they have significantly changed the conversations around not only education but also around public services, racism, democracy, and social movements. Other university students, like those in California and across the United States, have much to learn from RMF.

FROM “RHODES MUST FALL” TO “FEES MUST FALL” TO “THE DEATH OF A DREAM”

How, and how much, has RMF succeeded? While students have indisputably changed the conversation and won short-term victories, more than a year of direct actions, demonstrations, and occupations have endured increasing suppression. By the time of October’s Fees Must Fall, most of South Africa’s universities had been primed by RMF for larger protests that would move beyond the confines of the universities and into the communities and towns around them. By 2015, South African students were exasperated by slow and exploitative university bureaucracies, as well as by elected but unresponsive Student Representative Councils (SRCs).

RMF formed in March 2015 when marginalized students led protests with a clear, immediate demand: removal of a statue to Cecil Rhodes from the center of UCT’s campus.¹⁵ RMF’s success with the statue, and their proudly radical and transgressive tactics, inspired and directly contributed to a renewal of other student protest groups.¹⁶ In April, Open Stellenbosch (OS) emerged.¹⁷ OS was led by students at the even more unequal and segregated Stellenbosch University (SU), located near Cape Town in Stellenbosch—the historic “cradle of apartheid.”¹⁸ OS demanded major reforms to actually address endemic institutional racism, beginning with all classes being available in English, not Afrikaans.¹⁹

In July, the Marikana Commission Report exonerated all government officials, exacerbating national tensions.²⁰ In August, as the school year resumed, RMF seized the moment and escalated dramatically through evocative demonstrations about persistent anti-Blackness, evidenced by the Marikana Massacre.²¹ RMF highlighted negligible gains for Black students and South Africans with a transgressive campaign of graffiti- and performance art-based demonstrations that demanded students, administrators, and community members all “Remember Marikana,” largely by comparing it to the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre.²² Furthermore, RMF highlighted universities’ involvement, through board seats and investments, with Global North firms that remain dependent upon overwhelmingly Black labor for dangerous, underpaid, and degrading forms of labor—like mining.

Backlash increased against students who supposedly should have been satisfied by the removal of UCT’s Rhodes Statue, and whose protests were increasingly disrupting business as usual. As graffiti and other forms of transgression increased, outspoken faculty began dismissing as “ideological essentialising” RMF’s “attacks on liberalism.”²³ Many white faculty and students refused to consider how or why students were becoming increasingly transgressive when faced with increasing oppression. RMF’s unashamedly pro-Black attacks on UCT’s anti-Blackness transgressed established norms of respectable, slow, and ineffective bureaucracy-based change, which the most marginalized students were no longer accepting.

RMF PROTESTERS BLOCK A UCT ENTRANCE WITH A BANNER FEATURING AN IMAGE OF A MURDERED MARIKANA MINER WITH STRIKE LEADER MGCINENI “MAMBUSH” NOKI.”

(MEDIA CREDIT: EYEWITNESS NEWS AND RHODES MUST FALL)

Between August and October, drawing on the success and controversy of RMF and OS, many other universities and students increased their protests. Because of RMF, critiques increasingly became about anti-Blackness, white supremacy, Eurocentrism, abolition, decolonization, and radical change, instead of past acceptance of incremental change espoused by political parties.

With RMF and OS leading the way, university students educated the public on social systems of exploitation and oppression, both online through widely circulated documentaries and opinions, as well as in the streets.²⁴ Performative, transgressive, and ostensibly radical tactics blazed a trail by aggressively denouncing the persistent Eurocentrism and anti-Blackness at ostensibly democratic and meritocratic institutions, like universities.

The targets of their protests included, but were not limited to:

• Increasing privatization and exclusivity of universities, especially the wealth and power of elite populations within academia;

• White supremacy and cultural hegemony, manifested through universities’ Eurocentric epistemologies, methodologies, monuments, language policies, and hiring practices;

• Outsourcing of service jobs, disproportionately impacting Black and women laborers;

• White-owned, global capitalist hegemony dependent upon connections between universities and Global North extractive, security, and financial...