Speeches

Speech on Anti-Fascism and Abolition

given by ACL at the People’s Council: A Community Forum J20 #BeyondBiden #FascistFree541 1.20.20

Anti-fascism also involves abolishing the conditions under which settler colonialism, white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and ideological manipulation––all of which are essential to fascism––become possible in the first place. Anti-fascism must include the struggle to create real alternatives to capitalism’s regime of racial hierarchy and exploitation. We cannot remain within a reactive mode. For if fascism is the attempt by the capitalist ruling class to save a crumbling socio-economic order, our task it to let this old order die––to help it die––as we strive to create a world in which human beings can live without fear and anxiety.

Speech on the Necessity of Abolition

given by ACL at an action for Muhsin Sharif in front of Lane County Jail 12.11.20

When we speak of abolition, we do not solely mean the abolition of prisons: we also mean the abolition of the material and historical conditions under which prisons become possible in the first place and the creation of relations of care and solidarity, an infrastructure of mutuality. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney put it: “What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.” These negative and positive arcs of abolition delineate our everyday lives. They give form to our anger and grief, form to our plans and plots, our loves and desires, dreams and demands. In short, they express our aspirations and struggles for a radically different future. 

Speech on the Carceral Capitalist State

given by ACL at the BIPOC Liberation Collective Community First Feed-In 7.26.20

The struggle against the carceral capitalist state is a struggle against the political and legal apparatuses which serve the interests of the ruling class, who exploit workers and expropriate peoples and their resources around the globe, who sap resources by investing in war, arming and militarizing a police force which terrorizes and murders our Black and brown comrades, our trans and gender non-conforming comrades, who privatize healthcare andschools and make them into a privilege for the few, who live parasitically on the backs of workers of all colors. To struggle against the carceral capitalist state today is to struggle against all of these things––against counterrevolution––and to bring about a new horizon for freedom and human flourishing.

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