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Grassroots Organizing in Red States Is at the Heart of Abolitionist Struggle

By Meghan Krausch - Truthout, September 5, 2023

In Republican-controlled regions across the country, people are engaged in abolitionist organizing: Even though conditions vary, people are organizing for freedom virtually everywhere. This is nothing new. The South, for example, has been a site for abolitionist organizing for centuries, and it continues to be one, despite the attacks on long-settled civil rights being organized by Republican supermajorities in statehouses.

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is the first Black woman to codirect the Highlander Research and Education Center, a century-old nexus for abolitionist and labor organizing in Tennessee and beyond. She is also a cofounder of the Movement for Black Lives. Woodard Henderson says that if abolitionists really believe the most impacted and marginalized people are at the heart of the struggle, then red states and counties must be centered in organizing efforts instead of treated as lost causes. She notes that the South in particular is often ceded by national organizations — which, among other problems, makes it hard for organizations working in the region to secure funding from philanthropic foundations.

The sense of these places being lost causes is not only offensive, it’s deeply untrue. In fact, decarceral groups in red states and counties are seeing success even amid what many organizers see as the current fascist turn. For example, Florida Prisoner Solidarity, an abolitionist collective based in Gainesville that has members inside and outside of prison across the state, won a campaign earlier this year to make phone calls from the jail in Alachua County free and unlimited (down from a cost of $.21 per minute).

These efforts do not generally achieve the same visibility as those in blue states and so-called liberal areas — but this doesn’t make them less critical to abolitionist struggle. “Don’t give up on us,” asks aurelius francisco, co-executive director of The Foundation for Liberating Minds in Oklahoma City. “We’ve always resisted … and we’ll continue to do so.”

Organizers in red states and counties are bringing abolitionist struggle to the communities, in the process highlighting how their strategies seek to draw in people who might not normally see themselves as allied to “liberal” causes. This is a lesson that can be valuable to organizers throughout the country who are seeking new ways of growing solidarity.

Direct Unionism: A Different Approach to Union Activity

By Allan Hansen - Industrial Worker, August 31, 2023

It is no secret that the strength of labor unions in America has been waning in recent years. Union representation in the labor market has hit an all-time low, labor laws are more and more being drafted in favor of employers rather than workers, and employer-driven anti-union activity has all led to our unions growing weaker and unable to stand up for workers’ rights in the workplace. Despite these weaknesses, most people support unions in principle, and so we must discuss how to advance the labor movement in the face of these challenges. One such tool workers have at their disposal for such action is Direct Unionism. 

When most people discuss unionism they tend to think about it in a very contractual and bureaucratic way, and this is largely how unions operate today. Union activity is focused on the election of union officials and the passing of contracts. This idea of unionism faces several limitations. For starters, with a focus on collective bargaining, contract change can often be a lengthy process, and change can only be implemented when the time comes for a contract negotiation, which usually lasts for several years, and since the bosses are aware of when the contract ends and when negotiations are to happen they know when to expect an uptick in union organizing and activity, thus the workers’ bargaining power is diminished as a result of this predictability. If an issue of mistreatment arrives but no such policy is outlined in the contract, the union usually can’t do much to address the issue or seek restitution from the employer. The best the union can do in such cases is to fight for it during the next contract negotiation. The importance of the election of union officials also presents some potential problems in the advancement of union causes. While there are many honest and hard working people involved in labor unions, it must be addressed that our union leaders are not infallible. Many union leaders make a staggering amount of money more than the workers they represent. While this is not to say that union leaders do not do good work, the further that union officers get away from the workers they represent, the more they run the risk of being alienated from the realities that these workers face. It is also much easier for employers to put anti-union pressure on a handful of individuals, than an entire workforce. 

The Working Class Stake in the Fight Against Global Warming

By Tom Wetzel - Workers' Solidarity, August 22, 2023

I’m going to suggest here that the working class has a unique role to play in the fight against global warming because the owning and managing classes have interests that are tied to an economic system that has an inherent tendency towards ecological devastation whereas the working class does not.

In its “Code Red for Humanity” warning in 2021, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said: “The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse‑gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk. Global heating is affecting every region on Earth…” With wreckage from intensifying storms and people dying from heat waves, it might seem that everyone has a stake in the project of ecological sustainability, and bringing a rapid end to the burning of fossil fuels. As we know, however, various sectors of the owning and managing classes pursue profits from fossil fuel extraction, refining, and burning fossil fuels. They protect sunk investments in fossil fuel-based infrastructure (like gas burning power plants) or propose highly implausible strategies (like carbon capture and storage). Thus many sectors of the top classes in our society are a roadblock to ecological sustainability.

The working class, on the other hand, have a stake in the fight for a livable future, and also have the potential power to do something about it. The working class is a large majority of the society, and thus has the numbers to be a major force. Their position in the workplace means workers have the potential to organize and resist environmentally destructive behaviors of the employers.

Stop Cop Planet, Save the Surreal World

By Dan Fischer - New Politics, August 1, 2023

March 5, 2023: Approaching a construction site for Cop City, officially known as the “Atlanta Public Safety Training Center,” roughly 300 masked forest defenders cut through the fencing and chanted with conviction, “We are unstoppable, another world is possible.” Throwing rocks and fireworks, they caused cops to retreat. The crowd burned down several construction vehicles and a trailer, undoing about a month’s worth of work and causing at least $150,000 in damages.1

March 8: Reversing their ancestors’ route on the Trail of Tears, an official Muscogee delegation returned to Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest. They announced to the city’s authorities, “You must immediately vacate Muscogee homelands and cease violence and policing of Indigenous and Black people.”

It can feel surreal watching such inversions of the common-sense social reality where police chase protesters and settler elites evict natives.2 Building on the communal and sometimes jubilant militancy of the Standing Rock and George Floyd uprisings, the Stop Cop City movement effectively declares: to hell with your thin blue line, your economy, your authorities. Such authorities include Atlanta’s Black mayor Andre Dickens and his Democratic administration, as well as the leaderships of the city’s historically Black colleges. Referencing his school’s funding of Cop City, a student denounced Morehouse’s complicity in “a system that does not serve Black people.”3

Among the crowds occupying city streets and among the Weelaunee Forest’s tents and treehouses, signs declare commitments to police abolition, decolonization, anti-fascism, radical ecology, and total liberation. “Stop the metaverse. Save the real world,” declares a banner hanging between two pines. The message went viral, ironically, and why not? What could be more worth defending than an urban forest? What could be more worth stopping than the metaverse, that comprehensive virtual reality concocted by profit-hungry, surveillance-friendly social media executives?

However, for those caught in the rhythms of capitalist time, centered around working or surviving among the unemployed “industrial reserve army,”4 we often experience the “real world” as precisely the social reality responsible for threatening Atlanta’s forest. Hollywood Dystopia is Shadowbox Studios’ murky plan to destroy more of the forest, apparently for a massive soundstage complex. Cop City, a $90 million police compound, would be the country’s largest academy of militarized repression. It’s being built despite 70 percent of public comments in 2021 expressing opposition, despite the immediately adjacent neighborhoods across city borders not being given a say. Cop Planet is the world of transnational capital’s “mass social control, repression and warfare,”5 where—for example—Georgia’s cops receive training from hypermilitarized Israeli police.6 It’s the brutal reality where U.S. police kill people every single day, where Atlanta cops murdered Rayshard Brooks in 2020, and where Georgia troopers murdered Tortuguita, a Venezuelan gender-nonbinary anarchist, in the forest this January.

Cop City and the Escalating War on Environmental Defenders

By Basav Sen and Gabrielle Colchete - In These Times, July 13, 2023

The fight in Atlanta over Cop City, a massive police training facility, has turned into ground zero for overlapping crises facing our country: the climate emergency, vast political and economic inequality, ever-militarizing police forces and systemic racism. 

If we want a democracy healthy enough to solve these crises, it’s worth paying attention to what is happening in the South River Forest.

On May 31, in a disturbing move shortly before Atlanta’s City Council approved more funding for the facility, Georgia law enforcement arrested three members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which provides activists with legal support and bail money. 

Organized bail support for activists is a longstanding tradition, exemplified by the historical precedent of churches and community groups raising funds to bail Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders out of jail. Now, however, the authorities are deeming such acts ​“money laundering” and ​“charity fraud.” 

In reality, the fund was targeted for supporting the Stop Cop City movement, which opposes the police training facility. 

Many in the community fear the Cop City facility will be used to train police in counterinsurgency, further militarizing an already armed and equipped force. In a city with wide wealth and income disparities, more militarized policing fits into what community activist Micah Herskind describes as ​“the state’s retreat from the provision of social welfare and the interrelated build-up of policing and imprisonment to manage inequality’s outcomes.” 

The facility is largely funded by the corporate-backed Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), whose donors include Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, Home Depot and Wells Fargo. Militarized policing is a growing concern in the United States, and corporate-funded militarized policing raises further unease about law enforcement becoming directly beholden to corporate interests. 

As local resident Brad Beadles put it, ​“When private corporate donors are able to fund militarized training facilities for the police, they are essentially buying off the police. They are making it clear who the police work for.”

Stop Cop City Week of Action Showed Movement’s Strength Amid Rampant Repression

By Cody Bloomfield - Truthout, July 1, 2023

Much of the South River Forest, or as activists call it, Weelaunee People’s Park, has been clear cut. In a token gesture to the community, the city talked about opening a handful of trails in slivers of remaining public land. But driving past the original site of the occupation, there isn’t a tree in sight to hang a hammock on. At nearly 5:30 pm on a Saturday, three bulldozers rumble across the land, rearranging splintery piles of red dirt. Shadowbox Studios, also licensed to use the site, has completed construction. Ringing the perimeter of both, cop cars lurk, waiting for signs of trouble. I started counting in my head, then had to switch over to tally marks. Even taking photos is de facto forbidden; I was followed and then pulled over while trying to take photos from the street. By my count, 26 police vehicles were surrounding the site. The only sign of the previous occupation was a downed yellow tower, charred at the base, with “Defend the Atlanta Forest” written in green paint. In a tragic echo of the activists’ thriving mutual aid camps, the cops set up a couple tents of their own, where they could eat snacks out of a few metal trays and retreat to shade no longer provided by the Atlanta forest.

Coming into the week of action that took place June 24-July 1 — a week of protests, targeted boycotts and joyful celebration in nature designed to call national attention to Cop City — the threat of police repression weighed heavily on activists’ minds.

At Saturday’s opening carnival, one Atlantan, who wished to remain anonymous, was hard at work spray painting more t-shirts. Wearing handmade pinecone earrings and blue paint flecked combat boots, he painstakingly laid out foam letters as stencils. His own shirt said, “I can’t protest Cop City.” But upon request, he’d also make “I can protest Cop City” shirts.

“It’s about [addressing] the fear,” he explained. “Having solidarity with the people who are too afraid to protest. There’s the uncertainty and financial risk. It’s hard to evaluate risk — police stormed a protest downtown advertised as a vigil. I’m really rolling the dice about whether people will be holding hands or burning cars, or whether people holding hands will be attacked by police.”

Cop City is Bad News for Working People

Daniel Randall RMT at the XRTU Hub, The Big One

Finlay Asher from Unite and Safe Landing at The Big One Trade Union hub

Clara Paillard from Unite Grassroot Climate Justice Caucus at the Big One Trade Union hub

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