Power
"Power as the ability to make decisions that affect your own life and the lives of others, the freedom to shape and determine the story of who we are. Power also means having the ability to reward and punish and decide how resources are distributed."
Does this definition align with how you have understood power in the past?
What's an example of power that you've become more aware of as you have learned more about it?
Ruth Wilson Gilmore: "Abolition is presence, not absence."
"transformative justice is an infrastructure project for the abolitionist age. Its practitioners draw blueprints for a world in which justice operates as care work and safety means the absence of hierarchy."
How do you understand abolition and transformative justice in relationship with one another?
Questions centered in transformative justice work:
How can we make this harm no longer possible?
How do we turn towards each other to hold this space?
What’s all the context?
What first comes to mind when you hear "transformative justice"?
What's your reaction to this concept? Are you skeptical, hopeful, etc.?
"Mutual aid not as a tactic alone but as a vision for remaking society."
Do you agree that mutual aid can "remake society?"
Where might it hit limits in leading to large scale transformation?
Where has power advantaged you and/or disadvantaged you?
What are your relationships like with your neighbors/community now? As a kid?
What impact do you think this has had on you and your understanding of the world?
Punitive justice is described as what we are socialized to and used to in United States systems. It is characterized by removal of community because you have done harm.
Examples: expulsion from school, time outs
What's an example of punitive justice in your life?
What did you internalize or learn from this experience?
"This loss of faith in the state has been accompanied by a renewed belief in the voluntary and reciprocal care of others, commonly referred to as mutual aid."
Where have you seen or participated in mutual aid in your life?
Garza: "A lack of understanding of power is central to how it operates."
What is your immediate reaction?
Can you think of real life examples that back this statement?
Who gets to control who understands power?
Ruth Wilson Gilmore: "Abolition is presence, not absence"
fill in
"We’re trying to dismantle the existing system without rebuilding right on top of it. In other words, the task of transformative justice is not to build a new building in the ashes of the complex that we’re trying to burn down."
If we are not trying to build a new system as we burn down the old one, what ARE we trying to do?
Where does fear come into this equation?
"Kropotkin was not wrong about our natural inclination to cooperate. But how we organize and nurture that cooperative instinct is crucial."
Do you think you generally trust others? Why or why not?
How does this relate to mutual aid?
Garza: "Identity politics is the radical notion that your world-view is shaped by your experiences and history and that those experiences will vary in relationship to the power a group or an individual has in the economy, society, or democracy."
"The obscuring of identity politics when we map power deters us from changing how power operates in the first place"
Can you imagine what it would look like if identity politics were centered instead of obscured in how we view power?
Is it difficult to imagine this? Why or why not?
"There’s so many gaps in terms of basic necessities, and in terms of relationships, it’s really hard for people to picture other ways of solving problems, or to imagine life outside of the fear and isolation that predominate. Even people who hate what the cops are doing feel they don’t know what to do about bad things that are happening in their community."
The Ansfield reading centers relationships as key to sustained transformation. Do you agree?
What action can you commit to in your personal life to close these relationship "gaps" in our communities?
The video discusses a key component of transformative justice as "everyone holding some culpability."
How can we extend accountability?
What are the current roadblocks to shared responsibility in our society?
"Weathering the current crisis requires nurturing useful hope while avoiding palliative delusions. That means ditching magical thinking about the sustainability of those mass mobilizations of goodwill that make the nightly news. It also means recognizing that crises are excellent opportunities for revanchist right-wing forces to further raze state institutions and slam the lid on cries for justice. If there is a lesson from mutual aid’s role in past triumphs, it is that such community work was subordinated to the tasks of invigorating trade unions and pushing the state to enact universal programs."
How do you understand the relationship between mutual aid and federal aid/social welfare programs?
What would it look like to have both?