A new form of abolition is arising today. First it aimed ending America’s systems of prisons and police; today it goes to the heart of the matter: “Abolition requires that you change one thing: everything.” (Ruth Wilson Gilmore, revolutionary scholar). In that spirit, last year the League convened a conference or revolutionary writers, artists and other cultural workers to explore the central, historical question of the abolition of slaveholding private property then; and now, the abolition of all private property. What role can cultural workers play in preparing the ground for the necessary shift in thinking?
The 2022 Cultural Conference
Christopher Mahin, independent scholar and writer, explained the relation of yesterday’s revolutionary abolition struggle to today’s. The U.S. Civil War was fought for the principle of equality outlined in the Declaration of Independence, but then denied by the Constitution’s endorsement of slavery.
The struggle to abolish slavery grew within rapidly changing economic conditions. The steam-powered loom and cotton gin greatly expanded production and built the foundation for 19th century global capitalist expansion. Mahin also recounted how steam power, applied to the printing press, also spurred the explosion of cultural production, such as newspapers and books. “For thirty years before the Civil War there’s a cultural civil war, and there’s a cultural phenomenon called abolitionism. They produced novelists, they produced musicians, they produced poets and performance art.”
Steven Newcomb, Shawnee-Lenape scholar and director of the Indigenous Law Institute allowed the conference to use a video of his presentation on the Doctrine of Discovery. That Doctrine emanates from 15th century decrees by the Pope. It authorized the European monarchs to seize land occupied by non-Christian peoples. These original forms of property theft – land and chattel slavery – built modern world capitalism. The US courts continue to use the Doctrine to rule against tribal interests even in this century. Newcombe emphasized: “We need decolonization, not reconciliation.”
Mahin was asked about cultural work in the abolitionist movement. Periodicals published by Elijah Lovejoy, William Lloyd Garrison, and Frederick Douglass spread the word widely. Quilting communicated about safe houses and directions along the paths to freedom. The transcendentalist poets of New England raised money for abolitionist martyr John Brown’s defense. The 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, often vilified by readers of today’s awareness, nevertheless had the most profound effect on developing sympathy for the enslaved and preparing the ground for the American people to support the Northern cause in the Civil War.
Modern abolitionism: Envisioning a New Society
Maureen Taylor of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization began the closing session of the conference with a parable about how the various sections of the working class have been isolated in different silos fighting for their basic needs, but are beginning to recognize the necessity of fighting together rather than fighting amongst themselves for crumbs. The cultural worker of today has a responsibility to enter today’s cultural war to illuminate what is possible today (and wasn’t possible when earlier abolitionist cultural workers were active). The modern abolitionist movement envisions “changing everything,” and the “Land Back” movement envisions other ways of relating to other humans and to the land itself (and other creatures who live on it).
Today’s ruling class must rely on the historical-cultural forms of division to maintain its rule, while it deploys more and more concentrated forms of force and violence. Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, declares that “Florida is where ‘woke’ comes to die.” His office launches a war against teachers who attempt to teach accurate history. Books that relate stories about LBGTQIA and African-American people are banned in Florida libraries and schools. Curricula are encouraged that teach the lies of the “benefits of slavery to the enslaved.” Texas Governor Greg Abbot ships busloads of immigrants/asylum seekers from the border with Mexico to major cities in the US, where they are dumped without resources to sleep on the floors of airports or police stations.
What makes the abolition of private property possible today is the rapid influx of digital technology. Peer-to-peer networking and file sharing has undermined intellectual property rights throughout cultural production – from music to video to the written word. The same information technology has eliminated whole divisions of industrial labor. This kind of disruption of labor’s role in production creates a whole new class of people condemned to the margin of society. They are not just victims in the economic/culture war. They are the core of the new abolitionists.
Now the introduction of new forms of pattern recognition – called artificial intelligence, or AI – is replacing all forms of “creatives” in cultural industries, from newspapers to screenwriting. The 2023 Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild strikes identify AI as the enemy. Yet these technologies also pose a challenge to systems of property and exploitation in the entertainment industry. Never before have the choices been so stark because the possibilities have never been so vast.
Cultural Workers: Making the Revolution Legible
When these new abolitionists have no place to turn to procure the means of survival – money – their demand to be provided the necessaries of life undercuts the existence of capitalism itself. Cultural workers can build on that to help the class understand: When abundance is possible, distribution according to need is the way the world can and should work. We don’t have to live enslaved by the market! We have rights!
Damon Williams, from Chicago, closed off the presentations of the final session challenging cultural workers to begin the process of making the revolution irresistible. What precedes that, he said, is that “the job of the artist, or the cultural worker, is to make the revolution legible,” to focus on our accomplishments and possibilities, not just describe the “counterrevolution.” We make it legible by talking about what we are doing now to achieve immediate needs, but also for maintaining our sense of humanity.
“Abolition is the creative undoing of harmful systems,” Williams noted. Abolition demands today that revolutionaries think about becoming new people. In that spirit, people are gathering to form sustainable communities with hopeful and fearless hearts: to work together, to organize, and to resist the increasing destruction and subjugation.
At the center of this resistance are the cultural workers who articulate the moral and practical vision of a sustainable, cooperative human society that is free from class domination and violence, from war paid for in the coin of hunger and homelessness. In the spirit of this resistance rising everywhere, and its vision of a better way of being, and in the wake of an enhanced global war and war on the poor, the League of Revolutionaries for a New America is calling for a Third Cultural Conference: Culture and R/evolution.
To find out more and/or to help plan this conference, e-mail: culturalcommittee@lrna.org
Published on August 28, 2023
This article originated in Rally!
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