Questions and connections

This week the Boggs Center hosted a conversation with Andrea Ritchie focusing on her newest book, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies. The book explores how the principles of emergence offer us new and imaginative ways of organizing towards futures that cherishes life.  It is a concise discussion of the foundational concepts of critical connections emerging out of practices rooted in adaptation, iteration, resilience, transformation, interdependence, decentralization and fractalization. It is a valuable book to study in this moment.

The conversation began exploring the reality of a national police force and with the recognition that even the most abhorrent actions they take are not new. The latest revelation, that the Department of Homeland security has “authorized” the flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment and is training ICE agents to forcibly enter homes without consent or a warrant, is a practice long endured by many communities of color in this country. So, too, with the snatching of children from parents, and kidnapping parents from families. Local police forces in even the best of times have trampled on the basic rights, dignity, and lives of people deemed disruptive or “criminal.”

While the practices are well worn strategies of control and intimidation, the extension of them to every part of the country marks a turning point in the wedding of fascism and racial capitalism.

This turning point, combined with the accelerating crisis of ecological collapse, expanding warfare, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people, is raising new questions for which history gives us little guidance.

But it does offer us some sense of how people have been able to live in ways that made a better future possible.

Consider the good people of Minneapolis. They are able to respond in such effective, decentralized ways to the occupation of their city by federal forces of violence is because of all of the work done organizing people after the killing of George Floyd. The movement for Black lives raised critical questions and provided new connections among people struggling to understand how we could produce the kind of people who squeeze the life out of another human being. Those questions, and the connections formed by people willing to reflect on them are driving actions defending our common humanity and resisting the worst among us.   

Andrea reminded all of us that we were able to gather together to talk about creating something new only because others before us had dreamed another world was possible and acted in ways that opened up new possibilities for us. 

We talked about the importance of mass mobilizations as a way to slow down the drive toward fascism and to expose the violence inherent in this current system. At the same time, we recognize that such mobilizations do not build a counter power or create new possibilities of governance. Rather the most important element of any mass mobilization is the organizing that happens before and after any event.

Here is where emergent strategies invite us to think about the choices we make to act together. 

We need to be organizing where we are with conscious intent, to find ways to provide for the necessities of our common life. This is where the visionary organizing in Detroit has much to offer thinking about new futures. Coming together to create new ways of producing the necessities of life, developing systems of mutual care and protection, and creating cultural forms that affirm life, are the foundations for a just and peace filled world. 

There are no simple answers or quick solutions. But in times of such instability, what each of does matters. At this moment, it is critical that we find the ways to act together, to care for and expand our connections, turning toward one another to imagine the new worlds we still dream are possible.